Will you smile while, and after, reading this?

Whenever I review the old photographs in the family collections, I am struck by how much there is a near complete lack of smiles in those photos.  I always shied away from the camera, and even in the few photos that I am in, well, it is no smiling face.  My father went even a step further than the rest--if he spotted a camera being aimed to include him, he would quickly get rid of his animated expressions and put on a serene look.

Smilers we were not, apparently.

Not merely my family. Even now, when I visit India, it feels like people rarely smile, especially for photographs.  Or, if they do smile, most come across as forced, stressful, smiles.

As I noted in my Costa Rica reports (like here and here) women there had some of the most gorgeous smiles that I have ever come across.  An easy, natural, smile that somebody like me would never, ever, be able to generate.

In a recent email to a friend, I wrote, "keep smiling--the world needs smiling faces like yours."  The last thing the world needs is yet another serious face like mine. Even when I think I am smiling, students think I am being stern and serious!

So, what gives?  How come there are those, like Mallika who have angelic smiles, and then there are millions of us who don't smile, and seemingly don't even know how to smile?

Did people always smile for the camera?

Perhaps by now you are thinking that I am wasting my time writing about this, and yours by tempting you to read it by splashing Mallika's photo!

Well, a lot wiser and enlightened thinkers have furrowed their brows on this topic:

[An] article by Nicholas Jeeves, recently published in the Public Domain Review, suggests that, when folks frowned, they did so for reasons as economic, social and historical as they were technological.
Mark Twain thought as much. In one of his letters, collected by Jeeves, he wrote:

A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever.

Twain wasn’t the only believer in the idiocy of the style. Look back at painted portraiture — the tradition photography inherited — and you’ll rarely see a grinning subject. This is, in fact, Jeeves’s subject. “By the 17th century in Europe,“ he writes, “it was a well-established fact that the only people who smiled broadly, in life and in art, were the poor, the lewd, the drunk, the innocent, and the entertainment.”

Aha!

If you are like me, I feel sorry for you!  Ok, seriously, if you are like me, then you are thinking, "hey, how about the famous Mona Lisa smile?  Does that mean that people used to smile in the past?"

Leonardo impels us to do this using a combination of skilful sfumato (the effect of blurriness, or smokiness) and his profound understanding of human desire. It is a kind of magic: when you first glimpse her, she appears to be issuing a wanton invitation, so alive is the smile. But when you look again, and the sfumato clears in focus, she seems to have changed her mind about you. This is interactive stuff, and paradoxical: the effect of the painting only occurs in dialogue, yet she is only really there when you’re not really looking. The Mona Lisa is thus, in many ways, designed to frustrate — and frustrate she did.

Aha!

By now, you are probably ready to call it quits.  I bet I can make you smile with the following cartoon from the New Yorker ;)