You gotta S-M-I-L-E

After yet another zoom/webex/Microsoft teams meeting where I was confronted with a checkerboard of faces, I was reminded of the photograph ‘Crowd #9 (Sunset Five)’ 2013 by Los Angeles photographer, Alex Prager, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria. The image is one of Prager’s complex staged portraits of crowd scenes – this time the audience is in a sporting stadium. Prager has created other photographs of gatherings – on beaches, in airport terminals, lobbies, movie theatres and in public spaces – and by choosing characters, clothing, hairstyles, and poses that convey a range of personalities and time periods, the photographer taps into a shared cultural memory providing images that are both familiar and strange.

In Prager’s ‘Where’s Wally’ world, the passive and largely disconnected spectators convey a range of emotional states ranging from moderate interest to distractedness to boredom. A motley group of individuals, not one of them seems to be particularly enjoying themselves. I wondered if a random snapshot of virtual meetings would be ‘Prageresque’?

When we are photographed, we are usually told to smile and encouraged with phrases like ‘say cheese’. However, these ‘happy snaps’ are at odds with the way people are depicted in art, and it is rare to see a portrait of someone who seems to be having a good time.

If you are at a loose end and want to check this out, then type the word ‘portrait’ into the National Gallery of Victoria website. You will discover that there are 64 pages of entries with 30 images per page. Not all images are available, but it is possible to look at 51 pages or about 1530 images. The majority of the portraits are serious, sober affairs with only 19 (or 1.24%) displaying any significant degree of happiness. Of the ‘happy’ people in the collection, the majority come from three Australian photographers – Edwin G Adamson, Athol Shmith, and Julian Smith.

In 2013, Nicholas Jeeves (lecturer at the Cambridge School of Art) wrote an essay on this topic for the Public Domain Review. Titled ‘The Serious and the Smirk – The Smile in Portraiture’, Jeeves explored the history of smile through the ages of portraiture from Da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’ to Alexander Gardner’s photographs of Abraham Lincoln. See: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-serious-and-the-smirk-the-smile-in-portraiture

Jeeves points out that for most of recorded history, the representation of ‘smiling’ has been deeply unfashionable. While we might wonder if this was due to bad teeth, poor dental hygiene was so common that it wasn’t considered to detract from attractiveness.

According to Jeeves, the answer is more straightforward and relates to the transitory nature of the expression. He likens a smile to a blush and says: ‘[smiling] is a response, not an expression per se, and so it can neither be easily maintained nor easily recorded’. While it is easy to smile for the seconds it takes to snap a photograph or selfie, maintaining a smile while posing for a portrait leads to grimacing.

Further to this, portraiture was ‘serious business’ and was about depicting the gravity and rectitude of the subject. The outer public persona was sought by the sitter, rather than their inner emotional state which smiling might betray. Only a few artists challenged this – the Italian renaissance painter, Antonello da Messina and, most notably, Leonardo da Vinci with the ‘enigmatic smile’ of the Mona Lisa.

As portraiture developed, a painted smile became associated with lewdness, inebriates, imbecility and the lower classes. Caravaggio’s naked eros in ‘Amor vincit omnia’ from 1602 is both playfully seductive and salacious with his provocative challenge to engage in a range of licentious activities.

However, it was the 17^th century Dutch artists who revelled in depicting everyday life where we see smiling protagonists featured most often. Franz Hals’ portraits provide a dazzling array of his contemporaries with smiles ranging from ‘come hither’ (Gypsy Girl) to ‘I have a secret’ (Laughing Cavalier) to ‘you’ve got to be joking’ (Malle Babbe) – which remind us of the joys of life.

Similarly, Jan Steen’s genre pictures use the shenanigans of the Dutch people as both comic commentaries and moral lessons with the artist incorporating himself laughing as he admonishes his countrymen for their foibles.

When smiling does feature in paintings in the National Gallery of Victoria collection, it is most commonly seen in the demure and winsome smiles of young women:

Or the benevolent smile of the prominent intellectual Abbé François-Emmanuel Pommyer who was well-regarded for his wit and good humour:

Or the obvious enjoyment from pursuing a passion that Antonio Mancini has captured in ‘Man holding a mandolin’:

With the invention of photography in the mid-19^th century, smiling would slowly become part of the ‘happy snaps’ we see today. However, the early examples of photographic portraits conform to the staid appearances we see in art. While poor dental hygiene and the long exposure time required for early photographs are implicated by Angus Trumble (National Portrait Gallery, Canberra) in his book ‘A Brief History of the Smile’, he believes the most probable explanation is the continued association of smiling with aberrant behaviour. Arranging a not inexpensive photographic portrait in a high-end 19^th century studio with its elegant setting encouraged a certain decorum – especially as the photograph might be the only lasting image of the person.

As photographers experimented with the medium, poses began to shift away from formal to performative and smiling started to gradually emerge. This was enhanced when photographers moved outside the studio to capture people in their own environments which increased the range of ‘acceptable’ expressions for portraits.

However, it was the development of camera technology, with George Eastmann’s 1888 Kodak camera and then the affordable 1900 Brownie camera, which took the world of photography away from professionals and into the hands of the snapshot photographer and democratised the medium.  By the 1920s and ‘30s smiles had started to become the standard expression in photographs.

As Trumble notes, the spontaneous expressions in amateur photography bled into more formal photography and people developed new expectations about how they wanted to be seen. Interestingly, this also affected the manner in which people wanted to be depicted in their painted portraits. While photographers attempted to evoke the artistry of fine painting, painters increasingly sought to emulate the spontaneity and clarity of photographs.

In ‘Why We Say “Cheese”: Producing the Smile in Snapshot Photography’ from Critical Studies in Media Communication March 2005, Christina Kotchemidova (Communication Studies, New York University) argues that the broad grin we are encouraged to make when snapped is an American phenomenon and arose out of advertising – the beaming smile indicating consumer happiness with product acquisition. According to Kotchemidova, the proliferation of commercial ‘smiling faces’ was particularly effective at influencing the population to appear happy whenever they were caught on camera.   This is a reminder that smiling is less about our internal sense of joy but more about our current public presentations of ourselves.

As I ruminated on these ideas in yet another online meeting, I decided that I needed to work on my image. Instead of looking like this:

I wanted to look more like this:

So, here are some tips to improve an online presence: 1. Slow deep breaths encourage a more relaxed persona; 2. Turning slightly is more flattering than facing straight at the camera and typically our left profile is our ‘good side’; 3. Pushing our face forward makes us look thinner (and hides a double chin); 4. Avoid posing directly under a light which can cast odd shadows; and 5. People smile more when saying (or even thinking) ‘money’ rather than ‘cheese’. And, if all else fails, perhaps watching this before going online might help!