Long before taking a selfie was as easy as pulling your phone out of your pocket, capturing a portrait was a serious undertaking.
A new exhibit at the Woodstock Museum gives a snapshot into the history of portrait photography as far back as 160 years ago — from the late 1800s to early 1900s — when smiles were a rare sight.
Don’t Smile opened Saturday and highlights about 100 vintage portraits collected in Ontario’s Oxford County, curated from the museum’s collection of more than 13,000 images.
“We don’t think anything of taking a photo now,” said Adam Pollard, curator of the collection at the Woodstock Museum. “Back then…it would have been a big event.”
The exhibit goes back in time to when getting a portrait taken was an expensive endeavor, said Pollard.
It takes us back to an earlier time where this was an outing, an event — and even owning a photograph in early times was something special, he said.
“You had to get dressed up, you had to go to a studio, you would have been posed in positions. They would have taken a couple of photos, and hopefully they would have got a good one.”
The first commercial photography came around by 1849, but it didn’t get to places like Woodstock or London until the 1850s or 1860s.
Smiles were rare in early portrait photography
“Don’t Smile comes out of the fact that in most early photography, you don’t see anyone smiling,” said Pollard.
While there are a lot of theories why, Pollard said it comes out of sitting for long periods of time for portrait paintings, as the next evolution of the portrait.
On top of that, the first portrait photography required long exposure times upwards of 20 seconds. “It was hard to hold a smile for that long,” he said, though as technology evolved, the time soon came down to a second or two.
Back then, copper plates and chemical solutions were used to develop photos, but came at a high cost. When glass plates came around, the cost went down. Photos could be printed into multiple copies on paper.
More smiles emerged when the Kodak Brownie camera was released in the early 1900s. People started taking their own candid snapshots with people smiling. That bled into the majority of photographic studios around that time.
The exhibit features several famous faces from history such as Alexander Graham Bell, John A. MacDonald and con artist Cassie Chadwick.
For those looking to capture a bit of the past, a historic studio camera and portable studio camera from the late 1800s or early 1900s are on display. The cameras, on loan from the Annandale National Historic Site and Museum, were once used in a Tillsonburg photography studio, Pollard said.
The photos used in the exhibit are all reproductions because light can be very damaging for old photographs, he said. It also allows them to do some enhancements to faded or damaged photos.
“It’s very important for us to keep the collection safe,” he said.
WHERE TO FIND IT:
What: Don’t Smile: A selection of early photographic portraits exhibit.
Runs: June 10 to September 9.
Where: Woodstock Museum National Historical Site, 466 Dundas St. in Woodstock, Ont.