The Twilight Report

So today I was looking up the Presidential order of succession on Wikipedia today, because that does, after all, effect my day to day life a lot. Then I somehow found the POTUS page, which has presidential portraits at the bottom of the page from Washington to Bush II. It’s interesting to look at because you can see how the official POTUS portrait changed with technology over the years, but also you can see the emergence of the Smile!

If you go back in time and look at Washington and Jefferson, you see dour, somewhat gloomy expressions. I guess times were rough back in those days. Men were men, women were women, and nobody smiled. Ever. It really isn’t until the mid twentieth century that presidents start to look happy. JFK looks bemused, Carter is chipper, Regan looks pleased with himself, and Bush I has this dorkish senior photo smile plastered on his face. Fast-forward to this century and Bush II has that infamous smirk on his face. Like him or loathe him, he’s going to have the last smirk.

In my lighting class I had a discussion with a fellow student as to whether or not smiles were good for photos. I took the position that they are, although I should qualify that by saying smiles are nice for formal portraits. I hate it when I am taking candid photos of my friends and they stop to smile. When I first started taking photography seriously, my friends would stop and smile every time I pointed the camera in their direction, but fortunately this became tedious for them and thus trained them to ignore me. It’s much more fun to be a fly on the wall. So it is kind of ironic that I argued that smiles are good for photos.