No but the history behind this picture is really interesting
The reason that everyone always looked miserable in old photos wasn’t that they took too long to take. Once photography became widespread it took only seconds to take a picture.
It was because getting your photo taken was treated the same as getting your portrait painted. A very serious occasion meant so thst your descendants would know that ypu existed and what you looked like.
But one time some British dudes went to china to go on an anthropological expedition, and they met some rural Chinese farmers and decided to take their pictures. Now, these people weren’t exposed to the weird culture of the time around getting your photo taken, so this guy just flashed a big grin during the photo because he was told to strike a pose and that’s the pose he wanted to strike.
Okay, I’ve always loved this picture and was going to reblog it to my personal blog, but decided to look at the comments before I did. Long story short, the part of me that has spent the last decade collecting and researching old photographs ended up wanting to bang its head against the wall so I’m going clear up a few things here (I apologize ahead of time for any ranting, but this historical misconception is seriously one of my biggest pet peeves)…
So going off of and adding to the poster above…
No. The photo is not a modern fake. The accession record from the American Museum of Natural History is RIGHT HERE.
PHOTOS DID NOT TAKE A LONG TIME TO TAKE IN THE LATE 19TH CENTURY/EARLY 20TH CENTURY.
They did not take minutes and they certainly didn’t take hours as I saw several commenters saying rather confidently.
I have no idea why this idea is still so widespread, but by the time commercial photography took off (mid-1840s) the absolute longest you were going to end up sitting for a daylight photograph was about 60 seconds. By the Civil War, daguerreotype exposure time was somewhere around two seconds. By the 1880s you were looking at ¼ of a second.
I’m not going to go into why people didn’t smile and the transition of the cultural mindset about photography around the turn of the century because it’s complex enough that I have literally taught a class about the subject, but in conclusion…
– Photos didn’t take long to take.
– Believe it or not people have always had personalities.
I will now illustrate/back up these points using a few images from my personal collection…
Here’s a building falling down in 1893. Not easy to pose bricks in mid-air.
Here’s a train “running full speed” in 1897. It’s a little blurry, but something tells me if you tried to take a picture with a modern camera of a car driving 60mph, there’s a pretty good chance the results would be similar.
And here are some people with personalities…
Thank you for your time.
yeoldenews tagged this # don’t even get me started on post-mortem photography I would in fact like to get them started on the topic as I have been frustrated by the myths myself.
Mooncustafer 