Why people in the past weren’t smiling at photos?

Why people in the past weren’t smiling at photos?
You’ve probably seen old black-and-white photos of people with no facial expression in the distance. Have you ever wondered why this is so? Many people believe that the answer is simply technology, but there is more to it than that.

Early photographers always had to ask people to stay calm for a long time, so it makes sense that many of them chose neutral expressions rather than a smile. Try to freeze the smile on your face, and after a while it will become uncomfortable.

However, even when technology improved, and when photography could be done in less than a minute, people still refused to smile. Why?

For people in the past, photography was a very important, magnificent moment. They rarely photographed and not everyone could afford it. People didn’t take pictures every day, on the contrary, someone did it only once in their lives. Posing for photography seemed like posing in front of a painter, and it took about so long and maybe the faces were still serious.

The smiles on the faces of the photographs begin to appear from the 20s and 30s. Until then technology had progressed to the point that cameras and cameras were not owned by professionals alone. With the trend of buying them often, almost everyone already had a device, so people could afford more photos and more smiles for little money.