Say Cheese?

Photography was first invented in the 1840s and was refined and popularised in subsequent decades.

For centuries, the production of personal likenesses – portraiture – had been the preserve of the wealthy aristocracy, who would commission painters and sit for days, weeks or months while an artist created a vision on canvas. Photography brought speed and accuracy.

At first it remained the plaything of high society.  Queen Victoria became the first monarch in history to be more photographed than painted, and the Royal Family was depicted in numerous scenes of domestic bliss. Made available for public sale from 1860, these portraits became treasured collectables and hugely influential guides to what constituted an ideal family unit – in the words of The Art Journal in 1861, “enshrining our Sovereign and her family in the homes of her people”.

The average Victorian family did not own a camera but – for the price of a few shillings – could visit one of the many Photographic Studios that began appearing on every high street in the latter half of the nineteenth century.  Photographic portraits became cheap, mass-produced and available to all.

The methods involved in early portraiture can seem astonishing today. Because of the long exposures needed, a bizarre range of techniques and devices were employed to keep sitters still, from the popular metal clamp hidden behind the head, to doses of laudanum, and even, as some practitioners advertised, providing gas to permit photography “without pain”. Given the protracted methods involved in production, perhaps it is no surprise that the results – often to the disappointment of customers – were so still, formal and forbidding.

RCAHMS have put a call out to the public on Twitter to find out their views on when and why we started smiling in photographs.

Did improved technology and shorter exposure times allow for more informal portraits? Did people become more relaxed with the process of being photographed? Was it a shift in society from the supposedly repressed Victorian era to the more playful Edwardian period? Or, as one tweet has suggested, did the photographers’ jokes just get better?

Let us know what you think at twitter.com/rcahms