Art Forum: Art & Identities

The Happiness of Others: Social Identity and the Photographic Smile

Scholars have consistently equated the emergence of the toothy smile in photography with the popularization of the snapshot at the turn of the twentieth century. Decades earlier, however, enterprising studio photographers in the United Sates pictured the widely grinning mouths of newly emancipated slaves or of African American children eating watermelon. These images, in turn, set the stage for white Americans to appropriate the smile as a form of racial caricature within their own photographs. This lecture takes these comic performances for the camera seriously by reading them as deeply embedded in the social politics of the United States. Turning then to early photographs of indigenous Australians, it calls for other histories of photography to ask how and why national conceptions of social difference have framed the medium’s most entrenched conventions, like the smile.

Tanya Sheehan is an assistant professor in the Art History Department at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, where she teaches courses on race and representation, art and science, and the history of photography. She is the author of Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), which explores the relationship between studio portrait photography, medical discourse, and social identity.