Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, May 11, 1995 TAG: 9505110128
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOEL ACHENBACH
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
A: There are no photos of Abe Lincoln saying ``cheese.'' Instead, when people posed for photographs in the 1800s they wore expressions that said, ``We can't wait until the next century, when we will be allowed hobbies and other amusements.'' This phenomenon was pointed out to us by reader Mary Kopchick, of Troy, Mich.
Was the 19th century really that depressing? Well, yes, but that's not the answer.
Michael Carlebach, author of ``The Origins of Photo-Journalism in America,'' says that the lack of smiling in photographs was largely a function of shutter speed. There were no camera shutters that could click in 1/500th of a second then.
In fact the first daguerreotypes in 1839 took 15 minutes of exposure in bright sun. Improvements in equipment allowed exposures of just one minute, but that was still a long time for anyone to pose. If people moved, even flinched, they'd be out of focus. So they had to concentrate on staying rigid.
``In the studio this heroic immobility was usually encouraged by clamping the subject's head from behind with an iron brace out of sight of the camera,'' writes William Crawford in ``The Keepers of Light.''
So why didn't they just smile and keep the smile frozen? Because that's a lot harder than you'd think. It takes about 15 muscles acting in concert to manufacture a smile.
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of the experience of being daguerreotyped:
``And in your zeal not to blur the image, did you keep every finger in its place with such energy that your hands became clenched as for fight or despair, and in your resolution to keep your face still, did you feel every muscle becoming every moment more rigid; the brows contracted into a Tartarean frown, and the eyes fixed as they are fixed in a fit, in madness, or in death?''
One other thought: People didn't think having their picture taken was a casual event. They took it seriously. They posed for the ages, their image suddenly immortal.
Everything changed in photography in the 1890s, when the Kodak camera came out, Carlebach says. You'd take your pictures, send the camera back to the factory, and soon the camera would be returned with the developed photos and a new roll of film already installed. Note that the concept has been resurrected in recent years with these cheapie box cameras that you buy and then drop off at the drugstore.
There's something great about old photographs that has been lost. There was a craftsmanship associated with each picture in the old days. Back then if you had a baby you would take the little critter to the photographer's studio and come back with a beautiful portrait, suitable for framing and mounting on the wall.
Today, you have 47,521 mediocre 3-by-5 snapshots stuffed in boxes in the attic.
The Mailbag:
Berman L. of Bloomfield, Mich., asks, ``Will you kindly share your knowledge with your readers on the subjects of REINCARNATION and TRANSMIGRATION of the SOUL?''
Dear Berman: We are pleased to report that the Why column has undergone hypnosis and discovered that in a previous lifetime it was the ``It Pays To Increase Your Word Power'' column in Reader's Digest. No one believes us when we tell them this.
We don't actually know much about these topics, but fortunately we reached Gil Fronsdal, a Zen Buddhist priest in San Francisco who is also a Ph.D. candidate in Buddhist Studies at Stanford University.
Fronsdal explained that it's a mistake to throw around words like ``reincarnation'' and ``soul'' as though they mean the same thing to every religion. They don't.
Buddhists, for example, don't believe in the soul, exactly. Thus they certainly don't think the soul transmigrates (moves) from one person to another. Buddhists believe in a kind of life force, one that's not easily described in simple words. ``It's more like a propensity. A potential. A direction of energy,'' Fronsdal says.
Hindus believe in something that's more like a soul, he says. ``The Hindus believe that there's a kind of eternal essence, that looks something like pure consciousness, and that eternal essence gets reincarnated into a new body.''
So the Hindus see this eternal essence moving from one body to another. That's one kind of reincarnation. But the Buddhists have a different type of reincarnation, and indeed they prefer the term ``rebirth.'' The Buddists don't think that a person dies and his or her essence pops up in another body. Rather, the energy of one person sort of reverberates in another.
It's like an ocean wave. An ocean wave looks like it's moving along the surface. In fact, the water is mostly just rising and falling in a wave pattern. What's really moving is energy rolling below the surface.
A Western scientist might say that the Hindu reincarnation is akin to convection, while the Buddhist reincarnation is more like conduction. The Hindu's eternal essence moves from one body to another; the Buddhist propensity just gives a little bump to whoever is next in line.
The goal of a Buddhist, by the way, is to stop these cycles of rebirth. Rebirth is a kind of clinging to life, a grasping. ``The central aim of Buddhism is to release all this unnecessary grasping and clinging,'' Fronsdal says. Do that, and you've reached the state of nirvana (``a place or state of oblivion to care, pain, or external reality'' says our dictionary).
So what if you reach nirvana and then die? What happens to your propensity?
``That is one of the unanswerable questions,'' says the Zen priest.
That's our signal to shut up.
- Washington Post Writers Group
Joel Achenbach writes for the Style section of The Washington Post. Richard Thompson is a regular contributor to the Post.
by CNB