33. Smiling Victorians
... being a consideration of how we choose to depict ourselves on camera.
What do you do when you are having your picture taken? Smile? Pout? Hide your face? Hold two fingers up behind the head of the person next to you? I would mostly rather not know when I am being photographed, because then I wouldn’t have to cope with the problem of not knowing what to do with my face or my body.
Judy loves to take photographs; Family groups, selfies with us both in them, shots of me looking at something interesting, or standing in front of something interesting, or maybe looking up as if temporarily pausing in doing something interesting. She quite often gets a bit cross with me during the taking of these photos because I am pulling what she calls a gormless face. This often means that I have my mouth open. But if I consciously try to avoid having my mouth open whilst she is taking a photograph, and try to hold it closed, my expression looks unnatural. and usually something else spoils everything; my eyes are too wide, my eyebrows too high, or my smile looks ‘forced’. “Just try and look normal” she says, but how can I do that? As soon as I start to compose my features into something that might be regarded as normal it becomes an impossible task. What is normal anyway? The effort of consciously trying to control my facial muscles sends them into spasm, my brain goes into overdrive, and I look anything but whatever normal might be.
How long have people been posing in front of cameras for now? 185 years apparently. Back in 1839 a 3o year old bloke called Robert Cornelius have stood still for approaching a quarter of an hour in the sunshine looking into the lens of his experimental photographic contraption and took the worlds first selfie. He looks a bit worried. Like he’s thinking “is it going to come out?” I can’t imagine that his wife was watching the process telling him not to look so gormless. If she had been there she would have got him to comb his hair and straighten his collar first.
By the end of the 19th century, portrait photography was a thriving commercial business. everyone who could afford one wanted one. Poor old artists must have felt as though technology was going to put them out of work. Just like they do today. You can’t stop progress. They just had to find different ways of expressing themselves, and be comforted by the fact that everyone actually loves to have a portrait of themselves created by another human being. Either that or they had to buy themselves cameras.
Maybe the Victorians didn’t have to remain motionless for as long as Robert Cornelius did in that first shot, times were drastically reduced as the equipment got better, but they still had to hold a pose for quite a length of time, as the photographer set up the shot, focused his lenses, and fiddled about under a cloth at the back of his camera for what must have seemed like ages. The best thing to do would be to make sure that you were comfortably seated and that your body and face were as relaxed as possible. It would have been difficult to hold a smile or a pout for any length of time. Jazz hands were totally out of the question. Apart from the fact that they would have caused arm ache, they would have been impossible to get in focus. So early photography usually meant a very formal pose, which probably suited must people. It was a cheaper alternative to having your portrait painted after all, and painted portraits looked very formal. Even the Mona Lisa isn’t properly smiling, and the Laughing Cavalier certainly isn’t laughing. Not by modern standards anyway.
Of course, there were always faster cameras in development, but these would have been very expensive so, for most people, portraits remained very formal well beyond the end of the nineteenth century. The sheer number of formal photographs of Victorian people significantly colours our view of what they must have been like as people. it is easy to see them as stern, no nonsense types with no sense of fun at all. The fact that Queen Victoria is associated with an extended period of grieving for her dead husband, and having the catchphrase “we are not amused” just enhances this idea.
Yet, thinking about it, you only have to read the books of Charles Dickens to see a wealth of characters alongside the serious ones. Obviously, as a writer of popular fiction, his characters were often a little larger than life, with a higher than normal proportion of rogues, cheats and criminals thrown into the mix, but through Dickens’ writing, it becomes clear that Victorians were, in many ways, just like us. They loved and laughed, fought and flirted and generally carried on in much the same way as people have ever since we first decided to stand on two feet and talk to one another. They just didn’t usually get photographed doing all those things
Having your photograph taken was still pretty special when I was a youngster back in the 1960s and 70s. I only really got photographed on holidays and special occasions. Many of these were still quite formal. Classics included sitting stony faced on Santa’s’ knee, or holding a ‘normal face’ for a school photo. Such pictures would go on the mantelpiece at home, before being retired to a biscuit tin under the stairs, (safest place in a potential fire or accidental demolition) and treasured forever.
The photographs that we take of ourselves these days are the complete opposite of Victorian pictures. The process is so easy. We are ‘snapped’ all the time, many of us multiple times, every single day. There is hardly any need for formality at all, unless you are posing for a passport or a police mugshot. The shutter speeds are so fast that they can freeze your jazz hands in mid waggle.
Future generations might wonder if any of us were serious at all. They might even think that we were incapable of gravitas and were all frivolous, silly, people1 They would be as wrong as many of us have been about the Victorians.
The poem, Smiling Victorians was one of the first ones that I wrote when I started to become interested in writing poetry as an alternative to song lyrics. I had seen something online about smiling Victorians, and it had got me thinking more about the act of smiling rather than the history of photography. I just wanted to say that smiling is a good thing, without getting too sentimental about it. It is a good thing, and unlike lots of other good things, it costs nothing.
Smiling Victorians
We are the smiling Victorians We went against the grain We rebelled against stiff, starchy seriousness Frock coated frumpery And mutton jowled misery We are the cheerful subjects of Albert’s widow Some of us are children, who smile naturally Some of us are adults Who, common wisdom suggests, should know better Than to smile into a lens Without modesty They say that a smile is like an ankle or even a calf That only the most intimate of acquaintances should be allowed to gaze upon it It is certainly not a thing to be photographed and exposed to the stares of all and sundry But we say: Smile Look at my smile Smile back at me Let it happen Dissolve the starch Soften eyes and cheeks Lose yourself in the response There That’s better, isn’t it.
I blame Albert Einstein for blurring the lines with that photograph of him holding his tongue out. It was taken on his 72nd birthday in 1951, and it could be argued that it marks the beginning of the end of western civilisation, sending us on the downward spiral that saw us electing Boris Johnson as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Surely, Charles Darwin would never have posed like that for a photograph
A subject I actually studied via BAPA - the history of photography. This brought it alive. I believe (as I lived through the techy revolution of photography) that it had already found it's own broad niche. It was a useful archive, investigative tool, record and documentation. THe way we dote over pics of old wherever proves the point.
It also conserves ways of life in a manner more easily gathered than in portraiture - whence the subject will include their dog/horse/gun/car/motorcycle or even wife. I jape of course. But it contains clues, from candid shots, about details and methologies now lost. The flying cudgel at the miner's strike, a PM's sneer or discomfort or the way we dress to perform certain tasks - and whether they're performed any more.
Don't fold your arms is Ali's mantra, though we seldom photo one another. Its always been telephoto on wildlife - she carried on, I just point my phone at silly mushrooms. But from smiling Vics we can navigate back n forth as suggested, and passing the photobooth sillies and nudity for a bet, one wonders, as another selfie steps off a cliff, what next? Cheers Mike, always thought provoking stuff. Given that I can think...
Long ago, wagging school, in a cellar on Arthur Street, Rawmarsh, I discovered you could make monochromes look sepia by holding a lit candle a few inches below. And as lads in the 60s we loved sepia tone pics. Their occupants looked comical. Then I found a pic of that mate in a ballaclava with his ears poinked out...