When photography rewrote what a face was supposed to look like
The camera did not record faces neutrally. It recorded them through a chemistry that made blue eyes pale, red lips black and every blemish darker than it was, and people adjusted accordingly.
Photographic emulsions before the 1870s were sensitive mainly to blue and ultraviolet light and effectively blind to red. Red lips, ruddy complexions, freckles and broken veins therefore recorded as dark, while blue eyes and blue fabrics recorded as pale. Dye sensitisation from the 1870s produced orthochromatic plates and, later, panchromatic film, progressively correcting this. Meanwhile negative retouching became a standard paid trade from the 1860s, meaning that the photographic face was edited almost from the beginning.
The daguerreotype was announced in 1839 and within about twenty years the photographic portrait had become an ordinary purchase for ordinary people. That is an extraordinarily fast diffusion for a nineteenth century technology, and its consequences for how people understood their own appearance are usually described in vague terms about democratisation. The specific consequences are more interesting, and they start with chemistry.
The camera that could not see red
Silver halides are sensitive to blue and ultraviolet light and largely insensitive to green, yellow and red. Every photographic process of the first several decades therefore rendered the world in a distorted tonal scale, and the distortion was strongest exactly where human faces are most variable.
The effects are consistent across surviving portraits of the period once you know to look for them.
- Red records as black. Lips appear dark, often startlingly so. So do freckles, broken capillaries, ruddiness across the cheeks and nose, and any inflammation. A complexion that looked healthy in life looked mottled on the plate.
- Blue records as white. Blue eyes appear almost blank. Blue fabrics wash out entirely, which is why so many nineteenth century sitters appear to be wearing pale garments when the surviving dress is dark blue.
- Yellow records as dark. Yellow flowers photograph black. Some skin tones record much darker than they appear.
Photographers knew all of this and worked around it. Portrait studios advised sitters on what colours to wear. Backdrops and props were chosen for their photographic value rather than their actual colour, which is why theatrical and studio scenery of the period is painted in tones that look wrong to the eye. And makeup was applied for the camera rather than for the room, which is the beginning of a distinction that has never gone away.
Dye sensitisation, and the slow correction
From the 1870s, the addition of dyes to the emulsion extended its sensitivity into the green and yellow. Plates made this way were called orthochromatic, and they represented a large improvement. Panchromatic emulsions, sensitive across the visible spectrum including red, followed and became commercially significant in the early twentieth century.
The transition took decades and it was not driven by portraiture. Landscape photographers wanted skies that were not blank white. Scientific and technical users wanted accurate tonal rendering. Portraiture benefited as a side effect, and by the time panchromatic stock was standard, the conventions of studio portrait lighting and posing had already been built around the older limitations.
This matters for how we read nineteenth century faces. A modern viewer looking at a carte de visite sees a pale, severe, faintly unwell person with dark lips and an unreadable expression, and concludes something about Victorian character. What they are actually seeing is a chemical artefact combined with a long exposure and a headrest.
- The claim
- Victorians never smiled in photographs because exposures were so long that they could not hold a smile.
- Where it appears to come from
- A genuine explanation that has been stretched well past its period. Exposure times for the earliest processes were indeed long, running to minutes, and holding any expression was difficult. By the 1880s dry plates had brought exposures down to a fraction of a second, and yet the unsmiling portrait convention persisted for decades afterwards.
- What is actually established
- Established: early exposures were long and headrests were used to steady sitters. Established: exposure times fell dramatically from the 1870s and 1880s. Established: unsmiling portraits remained the norm long after the technical constraint had gone. The better explanation is convention: photographic portraiture inherited its rules from painted portraiture, in which a broad smile was associated with low subjects, drunkenness and folly. Dental condition and the seriousness of an expensive occasion also played a part. Technology explains the first two decades and nothing after.
The retoucher, an occupation
The other thing that happened almost immediately is that photographers began altering the negative. On a wet collodion or dry plate negative, the image sits in a varnish layer that can be worked with a fine pencil, a scraper or a knife. Adding graphite to the negative makes the printed area lighter, which means that lines, blemishes and shadows can be softened by drawing on them.
By the 1860s this was routine, and by the later nineteenth century retouching was a recognised trade with its own manuals, its own equipment, its own desks with angled glass and a mirror to throw light through the negative, and its own workers, many of them women, employed by studios at piece rates. Photographic journals of the period contain a long running argument about whether retouching was a legitimate refinement or a fraud upon the sitter, conducted in exactly the terms used about image editing today.
The debate about whether a photograph should be improved is not a hundred years old, or thirty. It is as old as the photograph.
Likeness, and the loss of an argument
Before photography, a portrait was understood to involve interpretation. Painters flattered, and everyone knew it; the flattery was part of the transaction and was sometimes complained about in terms that assume it as normal. What the photograph introduced was the claim of mechanical truthfulness, and that claim did something peculiar. It removed the defence.
If a painted portrait made you look unwell, the painter had failed. If a photograph made you look unwell, you looked unwell. The authority of the machine transferred responsibility from the image to the face, and it did so at precisely the moment when the machine was least capable of rendering a face accurately.
That transfer is the deep change photography made, and it has outlasted every technical improvement. The camera is still treated as a witness. Every subsequent technology in this section, the cinema close up, colour film stock, the phone camera, has inherited the assumption that what it produces is evidence, and each of them has had its own systematic distortions that took years to be described.
How to look at a nineteenth century face
A few practical corrections, offered in the spirit of making old photographs more legible rather than less.
Assume the lips are lighter than they look and the complexion more even. Assume pale eyes may be blue and that a pale garment may be strongly coloured. Assume the expression is a convention, not a mood. Assume the image has been retouched unless it is an amateur snapshot or a police or medical photograph, and note that the exceptions are precisely the categories where nobody was paying to look well. And assume that the sitter chose the clothes, the pose and the studio with considerable care, because a photographic portrait was an event.
Read that way, the nineteenth century face stops being a grim mask and becomes what it was: a person, dressed up, sitting very still, in front of a machine that could not see red.
Where to look
Readers who want to go further should start with the holdings themselves rather than with summaries of them. The National Science and Media Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum both publish catalogue and research material relevant to this article. Both links are given for reference only. Neither institution has been assessed by us, neither has any connection to this magazine, and nothing here is an endorsement of any organisation.
Questions readers send us
Why do lips look black in old photographs?
Because early photographic emulsions were insensitive to red light. Red therefore recorded as though it were dark, which affected lips, ruddy complexions, freckles and any inflammation. Dye sensitisation from the 1870s onwards progressively corrected this.
What is an orthochromatic plate?
A photographic plate whose emulsion has been dye sensitised to respond to green and yellow as well as blue. It is a large improvement on unsensitised material but still renders red as dark. Panchromatic emulsions, sensitive across the visible spectrum, came later.
Was photographic retouching common in the nineteenth century?
Yes, and it was a paid occupation with manuals, specialist equipment and a professional literature. Retouching negatives with pencil and knife was routine studio practice from the 1860s onwards, and photographic journals argued about its ethics throughout the period.
Did people wear special makeup for early photographs?
Studios advised on clothing colour and, for sitters who could afford it, applied preparations chosen for how they recorded rather than how they looked. The idea of makeup designed for a camera rather than for a room begins here and became a profession with cinema.
Why do so many Victorian sitters look unwell?
Chiefly because of how the emulsion rendered skin tone, combined with lighting from above through a studio skylight, long exposures, headrests and an unsmiling convention. It is largely an artefact of the medium rather than a record of health.
- National Science and Media Museum Photographic processes, cameras and the history of the photographic industry.
- Victoria and Albert Museum Photography collection, including nineteenth century portrait and studio material.
- National Portrait Gallery Photographic portraiture and the conventions of the painted portrait that preceded it.
- Science Museum Group Photographic chemistry, emulsions and optics.
- British Library Nineteenth century photographic journals, studio manuals and trade literature.
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