“There is something strikingly different about the quality of photographs of that time. It has nothing to do with age or colour, or the feel of paper. . . . In modern family photographs the camera pretends to circulate like a friend, clicking its shutters at those moments when its subjects have disarranged themselves to present to it those postures which they would like to think of as informal. But in pictures of that time, the camera is still a public and alien eye, faced with which people feel bound either to challenge the intrusion by striking postures of defiant hilarity, or else to compose their faces, and straighten their shoulders, not always formally, but usually with just that hint of stiffness which suggests a public face.”
An extract from ‘The Shadow lines’ by Amitav Gosh.
But in pictures of that time, the camera is still a public and alien eye ...”
The biggest difference of then and now pictures is not how people would look at the camera but how camera would look at the people. The slow shutter speeds of the cameras back then would require people to stay still and often hold their breaths for many if not tens of seconds. The casual. laughing, goggling, looking back at the last moment poses were impossible back then. The stiffness that the author mentioned is because of the movement restrictions, that photographers would impose on the photographees.
