picture of Italian son
Wonder if its a picture of Grgory Peck as a boy.
shareI don't know, but have you ever noticed nobody ever smiled in those old pictures. The old man who lives across the street from me is a nice, personable guy. But he's in his late '70s and has an old black and white picture of himself as a boy, about the same age as the boy in Italy and he has the same expression on his face as Tom Rath's illegitimate son. In fact they even look alike...LOL.
shareInteresting observation. In our house my mother framed and hung about 75 pictures from her youth and her parents' (immigrants) youth and I made the same remark: no one is smiling in any of these! But then documentaries about immigrant culture indicate that portrait-type pictures were taken by newly arrived families as soon as they could afford new clothes and the cost of the photographer, to send to their families back in the old country to show they'd gotten here and survived (and thrived). So it's probably more that it was considered a formal event, and less that they weren't actually happy.
shareThat could very well be. Remember, there were no Polaroid Instamatic cameras and certainly no cell phones to take hundreds of photographs. And you're right, in a lot of those old pictures people wore their nicest clothes and I can see where it was looked upon as somewhat of a formal event since they didn't get their picture taken very often.
shareSmiling in photos is mostly an American culture tradition. Other cultures, and even older Americans, don't often smile.
shareThat is definitely true about older Americans. Recently I was looking at an old picture of my aunt and uncle's wedding. They were married in the late 1940s after my uncle returned from Europe and WWII. My grandmother on my dad's side was in the picture and so were my uncle's parents. None of the three parents of the bride and groom in the picture were smiling. In fact they looked downright angry...LOL.
shareIt was not a desire to look somber that you see in the old photos of the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Before high speed shutters, a camera of the early years could take more than 10 seconds to take a fully exposed image. People could not hold a frozen smile long enough to prevent blurring, so very somber looks and stiff looking poses were used in the early days of photography.
I am not sure when the transition to smiling took place, but the change could only take place once camera exposure times were shortened to prevent blurring.