Smiling in photographs wasn't always the convention. The model for early portrait photography was the painted portrait—in which the dignified, timeless quality that was desired would have been undermined by rendering the subject as insanely happy for no apparent reason. Besides, there's something to be said for family albums that don't consist of dozens and dozens of images of people feigning boundless joy for the camera. At the very least, the ubiquitous mirthful grins and slack-jawed, sedated expressions of total contentment adopted by the subjects of modern photos are no more unnatural and strange than the solemn poses that were the norm in photography's early days. As for what we are apparently supposed to perceive as the unintended and unfortunate homoerotic nature of some of the photos: Again, it's only relatively recently in American cultural history that physical closeness and expressions of affection between men became taboo. It was during WWI and the period between the Wars that this taboo was constructed and cemented into place. Before that, the fear that the label “homosexual” would be attached to a man who was seen to be physically intimate with another man simply did not exist. Men and women of the era before hyper-masculinity as a defense mechanism was the norm would have thought it ludicrous to suggest that men (or women) such as those in the photos above were what *we* would call homosexual. For them, it was common for men to love one another and to express such emotions physically—but the idea of such men possessing a same-sex orientation would never have even occurred to them. They didn't have a word for such a thing because it did not exist for them—and because it did not exist for them, they did not have a word for it. The men in the photos were (are) men who love each other, and express that love publicly without fear of being thought of as lovers in our modern understanding of that word.
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