After recent events (such as Spring Break) have forced me to smile in family photos, I began to think about the nature of photo smiling. It started when a family member, when looking over photo they had just taken, complained my face looked "pained" and "squinty". To which I replied with anger, challenging the convention of smiling in photos. "Why do we even smile in photos, people didn't used to smile in photos," I said, thinking out loud. The brief annoyance subsided and I decided I really would find out why and when people started smiling in photos, and I would make a LorenzoRamble out of it too! While some people have always smiled in photos it wasn't until the 1920s that people began smiling more often. One of the biggest reasons for the drab and expressionless look of people in early photos has to do with the fact that early photos took between 60 and 90 seconds to expose. This also might explain why most early photos were done portrait sty