Four aspects of smiling face in Chinese photography

When I meet foreign scholars who study Chinese photography before, they will be puzzled and asked how the people in the photos are so easy to laugh when talking about smiles in mainstream publicity photos extending from seventeen years to nowdays. In a photography exhibition seminar on "educated youth - through the weight of time” recently, the topics of the speakers concentrated on the production of the smiles in photography and they gave many explanations.

For example, the local photography commentator Sunkai who had written a long article for the educated youth photography exhibition catalog of Tang Desheng held that " As people always prefer the crisp, beautiful scenery rather than dark and gloomy image, smiling face is the periapt to resist depression, frustration, anger, prevent self-degradation in a difficult years, it is also an auspicious picture of ideal future that the people and the photographer prayer commonly."

And as the exhibition curator of Tang Desheng’s educated youth photography, Frenchman Bérénice Angremy held that, “Tang Desheng’s framing was based on the only visible the political publicity photo standard”, this mode and aesthetic included the 1920s Soviet propaganda mode. Obviously, her evaluation opened a historical perspective for the production of smile.

What I spoke at the meeting was that one reason which could not be ignored was the discipline of invisible power on people. We were taught to give a smile when taking pictures since we were children. Therefore, we saw that a lot of portrait photography was filled with smiling faces. Despite the twists and turns of life itself, those portrait photos never had bleak melancholy. So, although those educated youth who appeared in the Tang Desheng’ photos had sorts of resentment, hopelessness and even despair in the real world, but when it came to potographing photos as a political task, when they faced the camera lens, they often exposed teeth involuntarily.

Today people might question the authenticity behind the smile at that time. Honestly, if we studied the production of the photographic image at the time now(including smile photo), there were already many difficulties. This fully discussion has the necessity. The basic consensus was that despite the "smiling face" in these photos, it would never make these "smiling faces" gave historical illusion to posterity. In addition to photography skills, a variety of special effects functions of image processing software, the collocation of color and picture clip could give you more good photo effects.