"Smile!": A Polemic on Fine Art Portraiture
By Stephanie Dean
"Stephanie Dean - Two Type 55 Polaroid proofs of the photo "Portrait of Two Chemists: Heika and Brian, Oakland, 2001." The photographer (and author) chose the non-smiling photograph and never questioned why she considered it a "better" portrait — until now."
"A smiling face has more mystery than a dull face."
- Odd Nerdrum, Kitsch: More than Art, 2011
With the help of the Oxford English Dictionary and a publication called "Public School Slang", Angus Trumble was able to trace the origins of the photographic command "Cheese!" to British Public Schools in 1910. This is indeed a definitive moment in the history of photographic portraiture. This revelation was not noticed by practitioners of photography or its historians, because Trumble's book was not about art or photography, but specifically about the smile. However, Trumble's finding has historical importance and meaning that touches all of us - everyone has been commanded to smile for snapshots at least once in their life. Where Trumble places this moment in his book is compelling - he includes it in the chapter entitled "Deceit." Trumble, like many photographers, does not trust the smiling face in photographs. Commanding someone to say "Cheese!" or telling them to "Smile!" is most often relegated to the realm of snapshot photography and sometimes comes into play in photos associated with commerce, such as promotional photos, headshots or advertisements.
While many people may be annoyed, or at most indifferent at being asked to smile for photos, fine art photographers have manifested their distrust and dislike of the smile into a pervasive phenomenon which dominates fine art portraiture: the photographic preference for sitters is that they not smile for portraits. The preferred, unsmiling visage results in a sort of blank stare, or despondent frontal pose; rarely there is a hint of a smile, but never nearly enticing enough as to cause as much discussion or speculation as Mona Lisa's smile. I am presently working on tracing the origins of this phenomenon in order to discover who, when, why and how this preference was put into practice.
Considering photographic history, the celebrated fine art portraiture of today by masters such as Reinke Dijkstra, Thomas Struth and Thomas Ruff have more in common with the portraitists of the past - portraitists whose subjects had to suffer through exposures of seconds in length while being strapped into contraptions just to keep them still for a "good" exposure. The product of this was a serious, blank and forced expression. The long process aimed to create a realistic portrait of the person, but could not relate the absolute authentic likeness of the resulting photo to the actual persona it sought to capture. The photograph was generally considered more "truthful" (or considered "the truth") than a painted portrait, and the concept of "truth" in photography is still debated and doubted today.
In photographic discourse on portraiture, ideas of authenticity, purity, and the unmasking of the "real" persona — as opposed to the persona that the subject presents to the world — dominate. If there is not a quote by the photographers themselves citing the importance of Arbus or Sander, usually the authors writing the introductions to their books and exhibitions refer to or cite these masters as influences.
Most portrait photographers are suspicious of the way in which people actually want to portray themselves to the camera, and thus they discard the sitter's desire in an effort to achieve what they feel to be the most authentic portrait. This suspicion is born of the assumption that the subject being
