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From a world without a "smile" to the tyranny of happiness, the great story of the smile

2022-09-30T03:48:15.071Z


On social networks, the tyranny of happiness makes the planet smile. Still, showing your teeth hasn't always gone down well. From the Kodak era to the TikTok era, the history of our representations in a few shots.


When you open TikTok to post a new video of yourself, it's hard to be ugly.

By default, your face appears '30% smooth', giving you amazing baby skin.

And among all the existing options (lipstick, eyeshadow, contour, etc.), you can also whiten your teeth, brighten them in one click.

Results ?

They become as phosphorescent as those of Ross in a famous episode of

Friends

– or those of the Cheshire Cat in

Alice in Wonderland.

An ultra-artificial smile, recomposable at will thanks to the magic of digital...

Read alsoHow our smile changes with age

On social networks, in advertising, on television, in the cinema, in politics: if you are not in the street, the smile is omnipresent.

Synonymous with happiness, kindness and benevolence, the smile struggles to be decoded, however, like a Mona Lisa.

In his recent and fascinating book

Sourire.

An anthropology of the enigmatic

(Éd. Métailié), sociologist David Le Breton sets out on the trail of this banal but always ambiguous social ritual.

For him, the smile is never one-dimensional – it is in essence “polysemous”: “The naivety of the “keys to gestures” or of certain biological approaches is to associate the smile with joy or pleasure, like a given “ natural”, univocal, universal.

However, […] its meaning varies according to circumstances and places, and sometimes crystallizes multiple and contradictory emotions.

In video, eight cult laughs of women in the cinema

In short, we can smile with arrogance, melancholy or even sadness.

It all depends on the context.

For two years because of the anti-Covid mask, we had missed the smile, its absence even constituting an “anthropological break”, according to Le Breton.

During the 19th century, many scientists, including Charles Darwin, studied the relationship between our physical states and our emotional feelings (in

The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,

1872).

In other words, smiling and smiling at others makes you happy.

But today, in our world saturated with images of happiness, smiling in photos seems to have become a new tyranny – like the selfie, the ultimate aesthetic canon of our century.

It has not always been so.

We can even say that in photography, the smile appeared only late.

How did this little "banana" that changes everything arise in our representations?

Smiling and smiling at others makes you happy

When we look at the photos of our ancestors, one thing strikes us: they all look a bit smug.

Difficult to find the beginning of a

smile

on the first portraits of the 19th century.

In question, the very long pause time of the models in front of the lens – which did not invite spontaneity.

Invented in January 1839 by Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, improving the findings of Nicéphore Niépce, the "daguerreotype" is a chemical process which consisted in fixing the positive image obtained in the "camera oscura" on a copper plate coated with an emulsion silver, then developed with iodine vapour.

Quickly, from the 1840s, the stability of the image and the sensitivity of the plate improved, and the duration of the exposure decreased, going from around fifteen minutes in clear weather in 1839 to around one minute.

The workshops specializing in this type of shooting multiplied, it was the beginning of a new fashion.

From the start, it was rather the bourgeois elites who had their portrait drawn.

And at that time, social conventions remained very marked.

The pater familias does not display any good-natured grin: he is in the gravity of his social role, and photography is there only to reinforce this status.

The art of photographic portraiture draws its codes above all from classical painting: you stand straight, facing the camera, looking slightly bored.

With the German photographer August Sander, an immense portrait painter of his time

(August Sander-Men of the 20th Century,

Ed. de La Martinière), the faces of the “worker”, the “painter”, the “peddler” are thus closed.

Florian Ebner, Head of the Photography Cabinet at the Center Pompidou and curator of the recent

Germany/1920s/New Objectivity/August Sander exhibition,

decrypts: "At Sander, there is a form of dignity, a serious approach, because it is the role embodied by the person in society that takes precedence."

For artists, smiling is not adequate for the art form.

Florian Ebner adds: “Melancholy is perceived as closer to a form of truth.

You have to escape what is naive, transcend the banality of the image.

The women don't smile either.

It was completely unseemly for a lady to show her teeth at the time, and it was not even a question of dental hygiene (at the time disastrous).

For the very conservative Victorian British society, there was even something sexual about opening your mouth.

Shocking 

!

At the end of the 19th century, the smile was still considered coarse, almost animal

At the end of the 19th century, the smile, which derives from laughter (in Latin

subrideo,

from

sub

which means "under"), is still considered gross, almost animal.

It is the prerogative of children, drunks, even the insane.

Emotions are contained, corseted.

A straitjacket that will begin to yield under the battering of romanticism.

Florian Ebner nevertheless qualifies: “If, for rites of passage, such as communion or the wedding photo, we keep a form of countenance, in the postcards of the beginning of the 20th century, a popular and “poor” photographic form, we begins to see smiles.

In fact, as soon as one leaves the world of the photo studio, with its aesthetic conventions, people are freed from a form of surveillance, whether that of the studio operator or that of the family."

The smile thus appears in amateur photography at the beginning of the 20th century.

It will soon find itself in the artistic avant-gardes, such as that of the Bauhaus in the 1920s. The emotion of the subject, its interiority, become cardinal values ​​– and will result in a smile.

A small revolution in representation is underway.

Full screen

Above, a Saturday Evening Post ad from 1966. Alamy Stock Photo

In 1920, the firm Kodak, which held the monopoly on the American photography market, marketed a brand new camera, the Brownie, at the ridiculous price of 1 dollar.

In the brochures accompanying the device, just like the advertisements of the time

starring

the "Kodak girl", the notions of pleasure and play are put forward.

The photo then becomes a snapshot, a celebration of the moment.

The demonstrations of emotions are therefore strongly encouraged, and everyone starts saying

“Cheeeeeese!”

.

In 1925, the German manufacturer Leica released its portable camera.

The rise of cinema, mass consumption and advertising will contribute to creating this new standard of the ideal smile.

Because to sell better, nothing better than a commercial smile, supposed to translate the deep happiness of the individual linked to the act of purchase.

The smile then becomes synonymous with commercial seduction – an Ultra Brite smile, like the brand of toothpaste.

It even then takes on a gendered dimension.

From now on, a woman must smile, at the risk of being taken for a shrew.

It becomes the hallmark of stars, from Marilyn to Julia Roberts and her

“million-dollar-smile”.

In the 2010s, a study conducted by the University of Berkeley, California, computerized 38,000 portraits from nearly 1,000

yearbooks

(year-end albums) to analyze the evolution of the smile of American high school students in the 20th century.

The result is edifying: the curvature of the lips has increased from 0 to 10 degrees on average in the space of a hundred years, the amplitude of the smile of women being approximately 20% greater than that of men.

With the rise of the Polaroid in the 1970s, everyone became a photographer, and the (slightly tense) smile appeared on the printed images instantly.

The shift to digital in the 2000s marked the end of the single image.

It will offer the possibility for everyone to control their representation directly on the screen.

And choose your best smile from the dozens of images shot.

From now on,

Full screen

Kate Moss for the Calvin Klein Obsession ad campaign in the 1990s. Alamy Stock Photo

However, a discreet form of resistance is asserting itself: these days, not smiling in photos is akin to a form of transgression, like a refusal to submit to the tyranny of happiness.

Already in the 1990s, the absence of a smile from the models, from the catwalks to the fashion shots, marked a break in our representations.

Why smile since it's the crisis?

It was perhaps Kate Moss, with her capricious pout, who best embodied this rejection of the game of traditional seduction.

Today, Gen Z, that of Instagram and TikTok, also rejects the old codes – and claims the right to pull the face.

Like many celebrities, who, from Bella Hadid to Rihanna via Victoria Beckham, Billie Eilish or Kirsten Stewart, display in photos what

“resting bitch face”

or, basically, a “jaded bitch look”.

For Marion Zilio, art critic and author of

Faceworld, le visage au XXIe siècle

(Éditions PUF 2018), "in our patriarchal societies, women, even more than men, are constantly subject to injunctions, they must be pleasant and smiling.

Resting bitch face

(plague face) is an insult addressed to those who seem to pull their mouths or relax their efforts to be attractive…, but this

RBF

can be understood as a strategy of resistance to a male and sexist gaze”.

What if the upside-down mouth was political?

So, you always say

"Cheeeese"

 ?

Source: lefigaro

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