I am walking along real marble floors surrounded by towering pillars. The rooms of this former palace are peopled with statues centuries old, created by artists long dead, but still living in our consciousness. On the walls hang works of art, each more beautiful than the one before, and the following more brilliant yet. I enter a main hall, magnificent in size but reduced in space by the hordes of people hovering around one small picture. The people are barricaded, forced to be distant from this one precious image, shielded behind glass. La Gioconda, known as the Mona Lisa, is famous for her enigmatic, billion-dollar smile.
I am tantalised by her smile but after a brief glimpse, I am forced aside by the horde waiting to be photographed with this priceless work of art acting merely as background. Long sticks protrude from the crowd, like alien insect antennas seeking food or light, carrying their image catcher atop. Any prop is used to get above the crowd for the closest picture possible. In front of the enigmatic smile, mysterious for centuries, the hordes from every part of the planet grin with gaping maws, wave, high five, peace sign and hang loose — reverence long gone in the search for cinematic permanence.
I notice that most of the paintings in the Louvre have subjects that, like the Mona Lisa, either are unsmiling or have only a pleasant turn of the lip. No big grins, no wide toothy smiles. In my early art training, I was taught never to paint a wide smile, and painting teeth was just wrong. If we view photography as an extension of art, painting portraits becomes photographing people. Seeing the masses with every type of camera and every pose, I ask myself ‘Why do we smile for the camera these days?’ When did that start to happen? I want to convince you that under no circumstances should you smile for a camera.
Painted portraits of the day were composed and dignified and mostly of aristocracy — a vast majority of portraits in this category are deemed ‘great’.
Reasons for not smiling could have been:
1. The subject of the painting had to sit for long periods of time so holding a pose was impossible. The artists’ expression was, ‘Say prune!’
2. Bad dental hygiene and consequent lack of confidence in smiling
3. Maybe they were just not happy!
Nicholas Jeeves in an article for online journal Public Domain Review states, ‘By the 17th century in Europe, 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.’
There are many famous and great paintings which illustrate these characters.
The camera
After the camera was invented around 1837, subjects still had to sit for a long time, and the non-smiling convention was already in practice.
But by about 1900 the $1 Kodak Brownie camera arrived allowing a photograph to be taken much more quickly. Early marketing showed people awash with huge grins which made everyone think about smiling for the camera. It was all about advertising a brand new fun product!
Hugely popular silent movies of the 1920s showed movie stars smiling; people started to copy.
A politician, possibly FD Roosevelt, started the expression ‘Say cheese’ to elicit a smile on the subject of a photograph.
Our modern personas need to look happy. ‘She’ll be right, mate’, ‘Good as gold’, ‘It’s all good’ — are favourite Aussie expressions.
It’s now accepted that we should look happy no matter what; we try not to reveal that we are sad, depressed, anxious, stressed — even though millions of Australians suffer from depression each year.
We use a smile as an artifice, a mask.
Why not show yourself as that authentic person behind the mask. I urge you to make your character visible, display your vulnerability, fears and doubts. Just show your face.
Now everyone — say ‘Prune’!
