Some Victorian sitters were persuaded to assume romantic fancy-dress postures before the lenses of amateur gentlefolk, but a stiffness of pose and expression was more commonly evident in the work of studio professionals. Though sometimes seen as the by-product of long exposures, this stiffness owed at least as much to prevailing taste. Photography echoed portrait painting in aiming to convey gravitas and respectability, and no great value was set on levity. Stereotypes were therefore the currency of the professional studio: men were serious figures of authority and women were calm and pensive. Nevertheless, long exposures did influence poses. It was often necessary to help sitters remain still: neck-rests were often used in the 1860s to assist steadiness, and the leaning poses popular in the 1870s exploited the support that furniture could provide. Another early posing principle sought to offset restricted depth of focus by keeping hands and face at the same distance from the camera. The popular female pose of hand raised to chin or cheek had, therefore, three advantages: it offered support, it kept features and fingers in the same plane, and it reinforced the air of demure thoughtfulness.
Outside the studio, poses were more relaxed, but still conventionalized and gendered. The narrator of Jerome K. Jerome's comic novel Three Men in a Boat (1889) thus described an encounter with a ‘speculative photographer’ on the Thames: ‘All the girls were smiling. Oh, they did look so sweet! And all the fellows were frowning, and looking stern and noble.… I arranged my hair with a curl over the forehead, and threw an air of tender wistfulness into my expression, mingled with a touch of cynicism, which I am told suits me.’.
Although 19th-century seaside pictures began to show signs of greater informality, it was the arrival of the snapshot camera, at the beginning of the 20th century, that introduced a whole new vocabulary of posing. Inspired amateurs like Jacques-Henri Lartigue and Alice Austen pounced on zany or extrovert behaviour. Suddenly people were being photographed in holiday mood, by someone they knew well. The camera's subjects were more at ease, and if they felt inclined to smile, they no longer had to hold the expression for any great length of time. Cheerfulness, even jokiness (perhaps as a defence mechanism), entered the repertoire and, as cameras improved, people were pictured in motion. The 1920s and 1930s in particular were the age of people caught striding towards the camera. Cigarettes, as signifiers of carefree sophistication, came and went. By this time, studio photographers were pursuing new directions. A romantic sense of photography as art, tempered by influences of fashion plates and Hollywood, expressed itself in atmospheric lighting and sitters placed at an angle to the camera. (The Hollywood ‘glamour’ pose, in conjunction with more revealing swim-and leisurewear, appeared increasingly in beach scenes and holiday photography generally.) After 1945, the professional portrait had again become largely restricted to special occasions, though these might be commemorated by fairly relaxed and comfortable poses. By the century's end, thanks to the rise in higher education, a significant new stereotypical pose had arisen—the young person as academic achiever.
— Robert Pols
Bibliography
- Pols, R., Understanding Old Photographs (1995).
- Schroeder, F. E. H., ‘Say Cheese! The Revolution in the Aesthetics of the Smile’,
Journal of Popular Culture , 32 (Fall 1998). - d'Astier, M., Bajac, Q., and Sayag, A. (eds.), Lartigue: l'album d'une vie, 1894-1986 (2003)
