Just look at this pho­to. Just look at this young girl’s smile. We know her name: O‑o-dee. And we know that she was a mem­ber of the Kiowa tribe in the Okla­homa Ter­ri­to­ry. And we know that the pho­to was tak­en in 1894. But that smile is like a time machine. O‑o-dee might just as well have donned some traditional/historical garb, posed for her friends, and had them put on the ol’ sepia fil­ter on her cam­era app.

But why? What is it about the smile?

For one thing, we are not used to see­ing them in old pho­tographs, espe­cial­ly ones from the 19th cen­tu­ry. When pho­tog­ra­phy was first invent­ed, expo­sures could take 45 min­utes. Hav­ing a por­trait tak­en meant sit­ting stock still for a very long time, so smil­ing was right out. It was only near the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry that shut­ter speeds improved, as did emul­sions, mean­ing that spon­ta­neous moments could be cap­tured. Still, smil­ing was not part of many cul­tures. It could be seen as unseem­ly or undig­ni­fied, and many peo­ple rarely sat for pho­tos any­way. Pho­tographs were seen by many peo­ple as a “pas­sage to immor­tal­i­ty” and seri­ous­ness was seen as less ephemer­al.

Pres­i­dents didn’t offi­cial­ly smile until Franklin D. Roo­sevelt, which came at a time of great sor­row and uncer­tain­ty for a nation in the grips of the Great Depres­sion. The pres­i­dent did it because Amer­i­cans couldn’t.

Smil­ing seems so nat­ur­al to us, it’s hard to think it hasn’t always been a part of art. One of the first thing babies learn is the pow­er of a smile, and how it can melt hearts all around. So why hasn’t the smile been com­mon­place in art?

His­to­ri­an Col­in Jones wrote a whole book about this, called The Smile Rev­o­lu­tion in Eigh­teenth Cen­tu­ry Paris, start­ing with a 1787 self-por­trait by Élis­a­beth Vigée Le Brun that depict­ed her and her infant. Unlike the coy half-smiles as seen in the Mona Lisa, Madame Le Brun’s paint­ing showed the first white, toothy smile. Jones says it caused a scandal–smiles like this one were undig­ni­fied. The only broad smiles seen in Renais­sance paint­ing were from chil­dren (who didn’t know bet­ter), the filthy plebiscite, or the insane. What had hap­pened? Jones cred­its the change to two things: the emer­gence of den­tistry over the pre­vi­ous hun­dred years (includ­ing the inven­tion of the tooth­brush), and the emer­gence of a “cult of sen­si­bil­i­ty and polite­ness.” Jones explains this by look­ing at the hero­ines of the 18th cen­tu­ry nov­el, where a smile meant an open heart, and not a sar­cas­tic smirk:

Now, O‑o-dee and Jane Austen’s Emma might have been worlds apart, but so are we–creatures of tech­nol­o­gy, smil­ing at our iPhones as we take anoth­er selfie–from that Kiowan girl in the Fort Sill, Okla­homa stu­dio of George W. Bretz.

via PetaPix­el

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vis­it a New Dig­i­tal Archive of 2.2 Mil­lion Images from the First Hun­dred Years of Pho­tog­ra­phy

Arab Pho­tog­ra­phy Archive Puts 22,000 His­toric Images Online: Get a Rare Glimpse into Life and Art in the Arab World

Take a Visu­al Jour­ney Through 181 Years of Street Pho­tog­ra­phy (1838–2019)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

In her 1938 essay “Three Guineas,” Vir­ginia Woolf won­dered “whether when we look at the same pho­tographs we feel the same things.” Woolf half-hoped that gris­ly images of the dead from the Span­ish Civ­il War might help put an end to the spread­ing glob­al con­flict. She rec­og­nized, writes Susan Son­tag in Regard­ing the Pain of Oth­ers, photography’s abil­i­ty “to viv­i­fy the con­dem­na­tion of war” and to “bring home, for a spell, a por­tion of its real­i­ty to those who have no expe­ri­ence of war at all.”

Math­ew Brady, the man cred­it­ed as the “father of pho­to­jour­nal­ism,” had no such lofty ambi­tions at the begin­ning of the Civ­il War. At first, he offered to pho­to­graph sol­diers before they left for the bat­tle­field, to pre­serve their pre-war image for pos­ter­i­ty should they not return. (He cyn­i­cal­ly adver­tised his ser­vices with the line, “You can­not tell how soon it may be too late.”) Brady was already a suc­cess­ful pho­tog­ra­ph­er and had tak­en por­traits of Abra­ham Lin­coln, Andrew Jack­son, Daniel Web­ster, and Edgar Allan Poe.

Hav­ing stud­ied under Samuel Morse, who brought the daguerreo­type tech­nique to the U.S., Brady opened his first stu­dio in New York in 1844 and became high­ly sought after. He might have safe­ly wait­ed out the war in the city, oper­at­ing a thriv­ing busi­ness, but, as he remem­bered lat­er, “I had to go. A spir­it in my feet said ‘Go,’ and I went.” Brady took his peti­tion all the way to Lin­coln, who approved it on the con­di­tion that Brady finance the doc­u­men­ta­tion him­self. “At his own expense,” notes the Amer­i­can Bat­tle­field Trust, “he orga­nized a group of pho­tog­ra­phers and staff to fol­low the troops as the first field-pho­tog­ra­phers.”

Soon after, “in 1862, Brady shocked the nation when he dis­played the first pho­tographs of the car­nage of the war in his New York Stu­dio in an exhib­it enti­tled ‘The Dead of Anti­etam.’ These images, pho­tographed by Alexan­der Gard­ner and James F. Gib­son, were the first to pic­ture a bat­tle­field before the dead had been removed and the first to be dis­trib­uted to a mass pub­lic.” The New York Times respond­ed as Woolf would sev­en­ty-six years lat­er, writ­ing of the pho­tos:

Mr. Brady has done some­thing to bring home to us the ter­ri­ble real­i­ty and earnest­ness of war. If he has not brought bod­ies and laid them in our door-yards and along the streets, he has done some­thing very like it.

Shocked the nation may have been, but the war dragged on three more years. Brady and his team not only pho­tographed the dead—they cap­tured every­thing from hot-air bal­loons to pon­toon bridges to breast­works to win­ter huts and wag­on trains. Brady went bank­rupt fund­ing the mak­ing of over 10,000 plates, many of them har­row­ing depic­tions of the war’s bru­tal­i­ty, before the U.S. gov­ern­ment final­ly bought them for $25,000.

The Pub­lic Domain Review has anoth­er har­row­ing col­lec­tion of Brady’s daguerreo­types—por­traits he took before the war that have decayed and dis­tort­ed, as have a great many of Brady’s pho­tos of the war dead. These images “were extreme­ly sen­si­tive to scratch­es, dust, hair, etc, and par­tic­u­lar­ly the rub­bing of the glass cov­er if they glue hold­ing it in place dete­ri­o­rat­ed.” Despite pho­tog­ra­phers’ promis­es to the con­trary, “this fix­ing” of the image for pos­ter­i­ty “was far from per­ma­nent.” See more of Brady’s Civ­il War pho­tographs at the Nation­al Archives.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The His­to­ry of the U.S. Civ­il War Visu­al­ized Month by Month and State by State, in an Info­graph­ic from 1897

Eerie 19th Cen­tu­ry Pho­tographs of Ghosts: See Images from the Long, Strange Tra­di­tion of “Spir­it Pho­tog­ra­phy”

The Civ­il War & Recon­struc­tion: A Free Course from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

No pho­to­graph sym­bol­izes Amer­i­can vic­to­ry more rec­og­niz­ably than Joe Rosen­thal’s Pulitzer Prize-win­ning Rais­ing the Flag on Iwo Jima. Tak­en on Feb­ru­ary 23, 1945, it shows six U.S. Marines rais­ing their coun­try’s flag dur­ing the bat­tle — a bloody one even by the stan­dards of the Sec­ond World War — for con­trol of that Japan­ese island. The Sovi­et Union had an equiv­a­lent image: Yevge­ny Khaldei’s Rais­ing a Flag over the Reich­stag, which shows a Russ­ian sol­dier rais­ing the Sovi­et flag on the roof of the for­mer Ger­man par­lia­ment on May 2, 1945, dur­ing the Bat­tle of Berlin. The sim­i­lar­i­ties are obvi­ous, but the dif­fer­ence isn’t: the Sovi­et pho­to was faked.

To be more spe­cif­ic, Khaldei’s pic­ture was “staged,” and “parts of it were altered before it was pub­lished.” So says Vox’s Cole­man Lown­des in the video above, which reveals all the pre-Pho­to­shop image manip­u­la­tion — a spe­cial­ty of Sovi­et pro­pa­gan­dists even then —  per­formed on Rais­ing a Flag over the Reich­stag.

“Khaldei super­im­posed some black smoke from anoth­er pho­to and manip­u­lat­ed the con­trast to give the scene a lit­tle more dra­ma,” which in itself may be an under­stand­able choice. But he also erased the wrist­watch of one of the sol­diers brought in to pose with the flag, a detail you might not notice even hold­ing the orig­i­nal and the doc­tored ver­sion side by side. As Lown­des explains, “The sol­dier sup­port­ing the flag-bear­er was wear­ing two watch­es, sug­gest­ing he had been loot­ing, a stain that did­n’t fit the image of Sovi­et hero­ism that Stal­in want­ed.”

A look at the pre­ced­ing few years of the war goes some way to explain­ing this. Ger­many had bru­tal­ly invad­ed Rus­sia in 1941, instill­ing in Rus­sia a thirst for revenge that began to seem satiable when the tables began to turn on Ger­many the fol­low­ing year. In and on their way to Ger­many, the Red Army, too, com­mit­ted crimes against the civil­ians in their path, loot­ing sure­ly being among the least of them. Rais­ing a Flag over the Reich­stag does its job in cap­tur­ing a moment of Sovi­et vic­to­ry, but as Lown­des says, “it also cap­tures, and then con­ceals, a sto­ry of vengeance and mutu­al bru­tal­i­ty, of mur­der, orga­nized destruc­tion, and pil­lag­ing, all cul­mi­nat­ing in this icon­ic moment.” And the more icon­ic the moment, the more poten­tial­ly rev­e­la­to­ry its details — even more so in the case of false ones.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Long Before Pho­to­shop, the Sovi­ets Mas­tered the Art of Eras­ing Peo­ple from Pho­tographs — and His­to­ry Too

Joseph Stal­in, a Life­long Edi­tor, Wield­ed a Big, Blue, Dan­ger­ous Pen­cil

The His­to­ry of Rus­sia in 70,000 Pho­tos: New Pho­to Archive Presents Russ­ian His­to­ry from 1860 to 1999

Down­load 437 Issues of Sovi­et Pho­to Mag­a­zine, the Sovi­et Union’s His­toric Pho­tog­ra­phy Jour­nal (1926–1991)

The First Faked Pho­to­graph (1840)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.