Nobody Told You to Say 'Cheese' — But Somebody Did, Once, and It Stuck

Somebody points a phone at you. You know what comes next before they say it. You have known it your entire life, from birthday parties to graduation ceremonies to tourist snapshots in front of monuments. The word arrives like a reflex.

Cheese.

Your lips pull back. Your teeth show. The shutter clicks. And you have just participated in one of the most widely practiced rituals in modern human life without ever once wondering why a dairy product is involved.

The answer goes back further than smartphones, further back than digital cameras, all the way to the earliest days of portrait photography — when getting someone to smile for a camera was genuinely considered a strange and slightly vulgar request.

When Smiling Was Suspicious

For most of human visual history, a wide smile in a formal portrait was not a sign of happiness. It was a sign of foolishness, intoxication, or low social standing. Paintings of royalty, aristocrats, and respectable citizens showed composed, neutral expressions — maybe a slight upward curve at the corner of the mouth if you wanted to signal warmth, but nothing approaching an open-mouthed grin.

When portrait photography arrived in the 1840s, it inherited those same conventions. Early photographers were trying to establish their medium as a serious art form, and that meant following the visual grammar of painted portraiture. Subjects sat still, looked slightly past the camera, and kept their faces controlled and dignified.

There was also a practical reason for this: early photographic exposure times were long. Very long. In the daguerreotype era, a portrait might require the subject to hold completely still for 20 to 30 seconds. Holding a natural smile for half a minute is nearly impossible without it turning into a pained grimace. Neutral was simply easier to sustain.

So for the first several decades of photography, almost nobody smiled in photos. Not because they were unhappy, but because smiling wasn't what you did in front of a camera.

The Problem With Shorter Exposures

As photographic technology improved through the latter half of the 19th century, exposure times dropped from minutes to seconds to fractions of a second. Suddenly, the practical argument against smiling evaporated. A genuine expression could be captured. The question became: what expression did you actually want?

Photographers began experimenting. Some encouraged subjects to think of something pleasant. Others used humor to provoke a natural reaction. A few tried coaching people to form specific mouth shapes that would photograph well — open too wide and you looked manic, closed too tight and you looked stern. The goal was something in between: relaxed, warm, and slightly open.

This is where pronunciation entered the picture.

Some photographers in the early 20th century began coaching subjects to say specific words or sounds just before the shutter clicked — not because of what the words meant, but because of what they did to the face. The ideal expression required the lips to part slightly, the cheeks to lift, and the teeth to become visible without the mouth opening so wide it looked unnatural.

The Mechanics of the Word

The word "cheese" works because of phonetics. When you say the long "ee" sound — the same vowel that ends words like please, freeze, and teeth — your mouth does something specific. The corners of your lips pull back and slightly upward. Your teeth come together or nearly together. Your cheeks round out slightly. The result, especially in the brief moment just before you finish the word, is a reasonable approximation of a pleasant expression.

It is not, technically, a real smile. Real smiles involve the muscles around the eyes — what researchers call the Duchenne marker — as much as the mouth. But in a photograph, especially a still one, the mouth position reads as friendly and approachable in a way that a neutral expression does not.

Other words were tried. "Prunes," which had been used in the Victorian era to encourage a composed, small-mouthed expression, fell out of fashion as smiling became more desirable. "Whiskey" was reportedly popular in some British circles in the early 20th century — the "wh" start and long vowel produce a similar effect to "cheese." Some photographers used "money" or "fun." None of them stuck the way "cheese" did.

The earliest documented use of "cheese" as a photography prompt in American print appears in a 1943 article in The Big Spring Daily Herald, a Texas newspaper, in which a U.S. ambassador describes using the word to get people to smile in photographs. It was written about as a known trick, not a new one, which suggests it had already been circulating for some time before that.

How It Went Global

The spread of "say cheese" through American culture tracks closely with two things: the rise of amateur photography and the postwar boom in consumer camera ownership.

Before the 1940s, having your photograph taken was still largely a formal occasion. You went to a studio. You dressed up. You sat for a professional. The social scripts were established and didn't require much coaching — you already knew how to behave because it was a serious event.

After World War II, cameras became cheap enough for ordinary families to own. Kodak's aggressive marketing of personal photography as a way to capture happy family moments — birthdays, vacations, graduations — created a new context entirely. Now anyone could be a photographer, and anyone could be a subject. The informal snapshot replaced the formal portrait as the dominant form of the medium.

In that casual context, "say cheese" served a social function beyond just producing a good expression. It was a cue. It told everyone in the frame that the photo was about to happen, gave them a moment to compose themselves, and created a shared, slightly silly ritual that loosened people up. The word itself became part of the experience.

By the 1950s and 60s, "say cheese" was so embedded in American family culture that it appeared in TV shows, cartoons, and advertisements as shorthand for the entire act of taking a photograph. It exported internationally through American media, and while many countries developed their own equivalents — Spanish speakers often say patata (potato), the Japanese say chīzu, and some Scandinavian photographers use omelette — the American version became the global default.

The Smile That Outlasted Its Reasons

Today, the practical argument for saying "cheese" has mostly dissolved. Digital cameras and smartphones allow for dozens of takes in seconds. Filters can adjust expressions after the fact. Portrait mode can blur backgrounds and brighten faces automatically. The technology no longer needs the word.

But the ritual persists, because it was never really about the technology. It was about the moment before the click — the shared acknowledgment that something worth remembering was happening, and that everyone in the frame should look like they knew it.

Somebody, sometime around the 1930s or earlier, pointed a camera at a group of people and said a word that made their faces do something useful. Nobody planned for it to last a century. Nobody designed it as a tradition.

It just stuck. Like most of the best things do.