I've come across an image of an unsmiling Victorian lady in my files and it set me pondering. When did people start smiling for photographs? Look on Facegram or Instabook and you are bombarded with smiling faces, but flick through a Victorian photographic album and faces fixed with seriousness is the order of the day. Perhaps it was a necessary response to the slow shutter speeds of the early cameras - it is easier to hold a fixed frown than it is a fleeting smile. Maybe it is that photographs in those days were special things; rare artefacts that would be handed down through the generations, and you wouldn't want your great-grand nephew's second cousin to think you were a flighty lightweight. Or perhaps it was that they were just miserable!
We will never know. Nor will we ever know who this unsmiling lady was. She was definitely a member of my family (she looks a little like my great grandmother, Emma Kirkham/Parsons. Perhaps her sister Eliza?) as her portrait was lodged in the family archives (a.k.a. the old shoe box kept at the back of the wardrobe). Whoever she was, I had but one message - cheer up, love! It might never happen. Or perhaps it already had?
But that initial sentiment is both premature and somewhat unkind. A little colour enhancement brings her to life and gives her more character.
And better still, an animation even brings a smile to her lips. I think I would have liked Great Great Aunt Anonymous.
And if she could speak, she might have given me this matronly admonition. Quite right, too. Mea culpa.
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