Together, they create a picture that's memorable even now. We don't know for sure why one man eating rice looked so happy — but we do know it led to a picture that can still make us smile today. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding. Financial contributions from our readers are a critical part of supporting our resource-intensive work and help us keep our journalism free for all.
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Like in this depressing wedding photo from If your wedding photos look like this one from , your marriage is doomed. Wikimedia Commons When we snap a profile picture today, part of the goal is to look cool or to document fleeting moments. But then why was this man smiling? This man is definitely smiling: A picture from — yes, — of a man smiling while eating rice. Next Up In Almanac. Delivered Fridays. Thanks for signing up! Check your inbox for a welcome email.
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Related Stories. America Needs to Get Back to Facts. Already a print subscriber? Go here to link your subscription. Need help? Willy is looking at something amusing off to his right, and the photograph captured just the hint of a smile from him—the first ever recorded, according to experts at the National Library of Wales. He was captured on film because he was born into the Dillwyn family from Swansea in Wales, whose photography hobby was inspired by relative-by-marriage Henry Fox Talbot , who invented salt print and the Calotype.
She was among the first to avoid the formal photography used during that time, favoring smaller cameras with short exposure times that could capture informal moments. His contemporaries were amazed to see a smiling portrait. In the 18th century, artists painted smiling people — the sculptor Houdon even gave Voltaire a smile in marble — to capture the new, sociable, smiling attitude of the Enlightenment.
But on the whole, melancholy and introspection haunt the oil portrait and this sense of the seriousness of life passes on from painting into early photography.
In fact this question might be reframed: Why are old photographs so much more moving than modern ones? For the existential grandeur of traditional portraiture, the gravitas of Rembrandt, still survives in Victorian photography.
Today, we take so many smiling snaps the idea of anyone finding true depth and poetry in most of them is absurd. Photos are about being social. We want to communicate ourselves as happy social people. So we smile, laugh and cavort in endless and endlessly shared selfies. A grinning selfie is the opposite of a serious portrait. It has zero profundity and therefore zero artistic value. As a human document it is disturbingly throwaway. In fact, not even solid enough to throw away — just press delete.
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