{"id":2867,"date":"2026-09-15T15:12:16","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T22:12:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/?p=2867"},"modified":"2026-09-15T18:41:37","modified_gmt":"2026-09-16T01:41:37","slug":"pretend-you-actually-like-each-other","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/2026\/09\/15\/pretend-you-actually-like-each-other\/","title":{"rendered":"Pretend You Actually Like Each Other!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I always thought the reason people’s faces seemed stern and frozen in 19th-century photographs was the daguerrotype process, which required extended exposures – too long to keep a decent smile going. This common explanation is wrong, alas. In his article Why We Smile in Photos: The Surprising Recent History of Saying ‘Cheese,’<\/em> Alex Cooke of Fstoppers<\/em> writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photography copied its conventions from an older art. Portrait photographers did not invent a new visual language; they inherited three centuries of painted portraiture, and in that tradition the open smile was close to taboo. Walk any gallery of old masters and count the grins. You will run out of paintings before you run out of fingers. As the writer Nicholas Jeeves lays out in an essay on portraiture<\/a>, the broad smile carried bad associations for centuries. It belonged to “the poor, the lewd, the drunk, the innocent, and the entertainment.” Respectable people kept their mouths composed. …<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The thing that actually changed the face in the frame was not a chemistry breakthrough or a dental one. It was marketing, and one company did more of it than anyone else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

George Eastman put photography in ordinary hands. His first Kodak camera arrived in 1888 with the slogan “you press the button, we do the rest,” and in 1900 the Brownie followed at one dollar, cheap enough to hand to a child. Kodak shipped more than 150,000 of them in the first year. That price collapse moved the camera out of the studio and into the backyard, the beach, and the family vacation. The photograph stopped being a solemn appointment and became a casual thing you did on a good day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What you did on a good day, Kodak spent decades telling you, was be happy.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n

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I always thought the reason people’s faces seemed stern and frozen in 19th-century photographs was the daguerrotype process, which required extended exposures – too long to keep a decent smile going. This common explanation is wrong, alas. In his article … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[75,77],"class_list":["post-2867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-roberts-posts","tag-photography","tag-playfulness"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2867"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2867\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2872,"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2867\/revisions\/2872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}