A Thing of the Past

I am almost always fascinated by black and white. That is, still photos taken way back in 1800s which lack the actual color of the images. Colors that, had they been captured and preserved, could have satisfied our eyes as the times of yore linger in our thoughts. Sometimes I tend to think that maybe back then the world must be plainly sepia and then time after time the wind had cleared away the atmosphere and revealed the true colors of the earth.

In amazement, I always wonder how it was back then. The photos of the past are in itself hypnotic. They seem like a vaccum that warps and sucks an audience into a totally different threshold to the past and altogether disappearing from the present - an amazing feeling that we will forever be curious about and will remain mysterious to this generation. The question remains: how was it like living as our ancestors lived?

In the same manner, the curiosity remains: What stories were invisibly going on around the background of the photographs? I have seldom seen portraits of the 1800s wherein the subject radiated a smile before the shutter closed, most probably because it would exacerbate the already constrained stint of a tiresome 10 minutes of posing before a sliding wooden box camera and, especially, on tightly fitted dresses that forbid free movement. I began to think that the people back then were utterly serious and didn’t find it necessary to smile or laugh, which gives me the notion that through time our generation became more playful and carefree. Probably because we came to realize, after the 1^st & 2^nd world wars, that life is too short and it is such a waste to acquiescingly live in the confines of unreasonable laws and irrational beliefs at that time, and so we welcomed change. At least that's what I thought.

Take the Boynton Boys’ photograph for example and see what I meant by non-smiling portraits.

Or the Humphrey's…

Abigail Jane Humphrey, late 1800s

Or the Schwab Family portrait...

Workers of the 1800s 

And a group of boys…

 These children, by one look at the picture, would give you an idea that they are almost of the same juvenile age of between 10 and 12 years. These boys are coal miners of the late 1800s. Not even one wore a smile, obviously not happy with the labor of mining at an early age realizing that this looked far from playground (merely an opinion of mine).

 I am struck in awe by how imaginative a set can become before a photo shoot in the late 1800s. Take for instance this portrait of Irene Done.

But a deviation in the history of non-smiling human portraits came across my sight. It somehow made me proud and sort of unsurprised to have seen at least a smirk coming from our very own.

Jose Rizal, left most

It was concluded that in this picture Jose Rizal and Nelly Boustead (fourth from left, Rizal's girlfriend) stole a glance at each other, the meaning of which only the two of them knew, before the photo shoot. That explains the inspired look on his face through a reserved smile.

And the amazement continues...

The first picture ever taken, circa 1826, was by the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce.

 Said to be the earliest surviving photograph of a nature scene.

Another non-smiling portrait, of Robert Cornelius, as the first image of a human ever produced, circa 1839.

Robert Cornelius, 1839

I can't help but wonder, what did Robert Cornelius do a minute after this very photo was taken? Did he smile widely to express his excitement for the first human photograph produced in history that is his own? Then maybe he took more pictures until he was competely satisfied with his work. But that we will never know.

The same question goes for this portrait of...

...Josephine Bracken. Was she thinking about Jose Rizal, her husband, while her photo was being taken? Where was her next stop after this shoot?
The fondly imagination of a probable daily stint after a still photo amazes me over and over again.

Louis  Daguerre, the inventor of daguerreotype process of photography, took a picture in Paris on 1838. The image required an exposure time of 10 minutes, therefore people or carriages in motion would naturally vanish from the scene. Surprisingly, a man stayed still during the entire procedure and what appeared to be having his shoes shined.

That man who probably planned to start his day by getting his shoes shined never came to know of his appearance in this photo that marked the history of photography.

Through the years, our cameras dramatically turned handy from a sliding wooden box. Just imagine how Roger Fenton drag along with him his full set of photographic equipment, referred to as Roger Fenton's Photographic Van.

1855

These people inevitably lived only for a certain period of time and one day led to a death neither new nor ancient to you or me.

A cemetery in New England with graves dating back to the late 1700s.

Had images been more permanent as it had become in the 1800s, let's say during 100 B.C. and the time of Jesus Christ, what would have the behaviour been in the photos? How did they look exactly like? What untold stories would have been drawn from the photographs that will be another left for imagining?

Stories that were accounted for and prehistoric cave carvings or paintings remained as the only concrete evidence and basis of the images of the past before the camera age. Believe it or not, in sheer wonderment, I always fantasized of being able to live in the B.C. or A.D. era. A curiosity that will apparently remain a question in my head where answers will equally be left hypothetical.