Long before anyone worried about blinking at the wrong moment, the yearbook was basically a scrapbook with big dreams. Students in the 1600s passed around albums for friends to sign and stuff with keepsakes, and it was more of a craft project than an official record.
The first bound, formal edition arrived in 1806, when the graduating class at Yale put together a book covering the school year, the students, and the faculty, as BUNK History explains. There was one catch. Photography had not been invented yet, so the students appeared as silhouettes. Honestly, a dark cutout of your head might be the most flattering yearbook portrait ever made. Nobody has ever blinked in a silhouette.
Photography changed everything, and it took a businessman to notice. In the middle of the 1800s a photographer named George Warren worked out how to print many copies from one negative, then nudged students into buying several portraits to trade with classmates. The result was the so called Warren yearbook, and NPR notes that an 1860 example from Rutgers has been displayed at the National Museum of American History.
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The oldest surviving yearbook of any kind comes from the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy in the 1820s, and the first high school edition, a book called The Evergreen, followed in 1845, according to a public library’s history lesson. Teenagers have been posing for yearbook cameras for roughly 180 years. We have not gotten better at it.
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So where does the awkwardness come from? Partly from the grim old days of portraiture. The popular theory says early subjects looked stern because exposures took forever, but Imaging Resource points out that split second exposures were possible by the 1870s and people still looked serious.
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The better explanation is that portraits were supposed to resemble paintings, and a big grin did not suggest dignity. A newspaper feature from The Citizen adds that Victorian and Edwardian culture frowned on smiling, and that studios once asked people to say prunes instead of cheese. Prunes! No wonder everyone looked like they had just been handed a bill. Yearbook photography inherited that stiff, hold still tradition, and plenty of us are still carrying it around.
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Then came the modern picture day, which is where the real trouble starts. A school photographer in Atlanta told Mental Floss that the job allows about thirty seconds per kid. Half a minute to sit on a stool, tilt your chin, and look delighted in a gym while a stranger gives orders and a long line of classmates watches.
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