Say cheese

SEELEY LAKE – When taking group portraits, a photographer often gets everyone to smile at the same time by prompting them: "Say cheese!" But what does cheese have to do with pictures or smiles?

There is no connection between photography and compressed milk curds but pronouncing the double long "e" of "cheese" requires drawing back the lips and turning the corners of the mouth upward. In other words, smiling.

Just who decided the word should be "cheese" instead of "bees" or "trees" or "peas" is unknown. But a 1943 article in a Texas newspaper, The Big Spring Herald, gives a hint as to how the idea spread. The article headline was "Need to Put On A Smile? Here's How: Say 'Cheese.'"

Claiming the gimmick was "guaranteed to make you look pleasant no matter what you're thinking," the paper attributed the idea to Ambassador Joseph E. Davies. Davies is quoted as saying, "It's simple. Just say 'Cheese.' It's an automatic smile." Davies went on to add, "I learned that from a politician. An astute politician, a very great politician. But, of course, I cannot tell you who he was..." (It is generally assumed the politician he referred to is President Franklin Roosevelt.)

Over time, people became less enchanted with the artificial smile produced by saying "cheese" and the word "cheesy" was born, its meaning extending to convey "cheap" "unpleasant" "trite" "overdramatic" or "blatantly inauthentic."

Smiling – cheesy or not – was not always a desired look in portraiture. In the early days of photography, family groupings, even those including children of a rambunctious age, show each person staring stoically at the camera. Many reasons have been posited for the stern looks.

The most common is that early daguerreotype photographs required a long time for an object to be impressed upon the film and it is difficult to continuously hold a smile pose. Another claim for the somber photos is that for a number of centuries, the most common remedy for dental problems was pulling the tooth. According to the theory, people with chipped or missing teeth preferred not to broadcast their problem in a photograph.

A quick journey through art history suggests another reason: smiling was not a culturally acceptable look among the upper class. Smiling was for the lewd, the drunk and peasants.

St. Jean-Baptiste De La Salle wrote in his 1703 "The Rules of Christian Decorum and Civility," "There are some who raise their upper lip so high...that their teeth are almost entirely visible. This is entirely contradictory to decorum, which forbids you to allow your teeth to be uncovered, since nature gave us lips to conceal them."

A century later, Charles Dickens in "Nicholas Nickleby" had his portrait-painter character Miss La Creevy declare, "There are only two styles of portrait painting: the serious and the smirk; and we always use the serious for professional people (except actors sometimes), and the smirk for private ladies and gentleman who don't care so much about looking clever."

Given the ever rising number of people who pull out their camera phone and selfie stick on the slightest whim and then post their latest portrait on social media, there apparently are a world-full of people who "don't care so much about looking clever."