By Nila Kartika Wati 
Hand a phone to a group of teenagers in Osaka and start counting. You will rarely reach three before the first two fingers go up beside a chin, forming a V-sign. Point the same camera at strangers in Moscow, and you might receive a level, unsmiling gaze that an American might interpret as hostility, but a Russian would recognize as basic composure. The way a body arranges itself in front of a lens is not an inherent instinct but a deeply ingrained cultural dialect, learned from a young age and specific to place. This phenomenon offers a fascinating tour of how non-verbal communication shifts dramatically as one crosses international borders, impacting everything from casual snapshots to formal portraits.
The Performative Nature of Being Photographed
The instant a lens is perceived, a fundamental shift occurs in human behavior. This performative aspect of photography was precisely articulated by the French literary theorist Roland Barthes in his seminal 1980 work on photography, Camera Lucida. "Once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes," Barthes wrote. "I constitute myself in the process of ‘posing,’ I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image." This "second body," meticulously constructed for the camera, is rarely a raw, unfiltered expression of one’s inner state. Instead, it is a carefully curated performance, and like any performance, it adheres to a script.
These scripts are overwhelmingly cultural, and psychologists have extensively measured the significant divergence between them. A well-known experiment conducted by Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen provided compelling evidence of these "display rules." Japanese and American students were shown a stressful, graphic film. When observed alone, both groups reacted with remarkable similarity, their faces creasing into identical expressions of disgust and distress. However, the scenario changed dramatically when an authority figure entered the room and questioned them about what they had seen. The American students largely continued to display their negative feelings, while the Japanese students masked their grimaces with polite smiles, adhering to societal norms that prioritize social harmony and emotional restraint in public. This experiment, using the same visual stimulus and the same species-wide facial muscles, revealed two distinct cultural rules dictating which face is permissible to wear in front of another person. Posing for a photograph, it turns out, operates on precisely the same machinery of cultural conditioning.
This inherent performativity explains why a portrait often travels so poorly as definitive evidence of character. A stern, unsmiling farmer in a hundred-year-old daguerreotype from Europe was not necessarily colder or less joyful than a modern individual. Conversely, a broadly grinning tourist in a contemporary frame is not inherently warmer or more sincere. Each individual is, consciously or unconsciously, obeying a local instruction about the appropriate facial expression and body posture when being recorded. Once this fundamental principle is understood—that photographic instructions change by country and culture—the myriad snapshots from across the globe begin to read less like universal truths and more like diverse cultural phrasebooks, each offering a unique lexicon of visual communication.
The Global Lexicon of Gestures: The V-Sign’s Journey
Among the most universally recognized photographic poses today is the two-finger V-sign. This gesture has become a default hand position when a camera appears across Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, and much of East and Southeast Asia, adopted by schoolchildren, grandmothers, and even prime ministers. While it might appear timeless, its pervasive adoption is a relatively recent phenomenon, its journey traceable through distinct historical phases.
The gesture itself emerged from the crucible of World War II. In January 1941, Victor de Laveleye, a Belgian broadcaster working for the BBC’s French-language service, urged citizens in occupied Europe to chalk the letter V everywhere as a unifying symbol of resistance. V stood for victoire in French, vrijheid in Dutch, and victory in English. The idea quickly gained traction, reinforced by the BBC’s broadcasts, which incorporated the Morse code for V (three dots and a dash) into its programming, notably using the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. By that summer, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had famously adopted the two-finger salute, palm outward, as his personal trademark, solidifying its association with defiance and triumph. This wartime symbol is the direct ancestor of the "peace sign" that later gained prominence through the 1960s counterculture movement in the West.
However, its transformation into the reflexive pose of Asian photography is a distinct and more recent narrative, the precise origins of which remain somewhat debated. Two primary explanations are most frequently cited. One theory credits American figure skater Janet Lynn, who, as a gold-medal favorite at the 1972 Winter Olympics in Sapporo, Japan, famously fell during her routine but captivated the nation by maintaining a radiant smile throughout. Lynn, a known peace activist, subsequently toured Japan, frequently flashing the V-sign, becoming a significant media sensation. Another theory attributes its popularization to Jun Inoue, the singer of the band The Spiders, who, as a spokesman for Konica cameras, is said to have spontaneously thrown a V-sign during a commercial shoot around the same period. While publications like Time have explored both threads, no single, definitive origin has been cleanly identified, with other cultural touchstones, such as popular manga series like the volleyball-themed "Sain wa V!", also playing a role in disseminating the shape.
What is clear is the trajectory of its subsequent integration. Throughout the 1980s, the gesture became deeply intertwined with Japan’s burgeoning kawaii (cuteness) culture and the explosion of women’s magazines. It solidified into a ubiquitous rule for casual snapshots. Photographers and stylists continue to recommend it as a framing technique, noting that a V-sign held near the jaw can visually narrow the face’s width, enhancing a perception of cuteness in the frame. Thus, a pose initially conceived for wartime defiance was, within a few decades, completely repurposed into an accessory for achieving an adorable photographic aesthetic, illustrating a profound cultural reinterpretation.
The Nuances of the Smile: A Cultural Barometer
While Americans often regard the open smile as the default and most appropriate expression for any photograph—projecting warmth, openness, and a subtle assertiveness—much of the world operates under different norms. A significant study of 44 cultures, published in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior by psychologist Kuba Krys and a large international team of collaborators, revealed surprising variations in how a smile is perceived. Participants worldwide were shown identical smiling and neutral faces and asked to rate the person’s intelligence and honesty. In some countries, a smile yielded the expected positive associations, boosting perceived intelligence and honesty. However, in others, it came at a cost. Across diverse cultures including Japan, India, Iran, South Korea, and Russia, the smiling face was consistently rated as less intelligent than the identical neutral one.
Two distinct patterns emerged from the extensive data. The "intelligence penalty" associated with smiling tracked with a cultural metric known as uncertainty avoidance, a GLOBE (Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness) measure. This penalty was most pronounced in societies scoring low on uncertainty avoidance, where social conditions are widely perceived as unpredictable or unstable. The authors proposed that in such contexts, an indiscriminate smile might broadcast a level of confidence or complacency that the situation does not warrant, and this perceived inconsistency is interpreted as a lack of sagacity. The judgment of honesty, conversely, correlated with societal corruption indicators. The inherent trust advantage that a smile typically confers diminished significantly as corruption levels rose within a society. Both findings represent correlations across countries rather than direct, causally demonstrated mechanisms, a point the paper’s authors duly emphasize.
The Russian proverb, "Laughing for no reason is a sign of foolishness," encapsulates this cultural perspective succinctly. In such contexts, a smile is reserved for specific, earned moments—directed at someone genuinely liked or triggered by authentic humor. A blank grin offered to a stranger or held for a passport officer can be perceived as insincere, naive, or even dim-witted. This cultural conditioning explains why much of the world’s formal portraiture, particularly from Eastern Europe and parts of Asia, retains a sober, composed quality. The neutral, self-possessed face captured in a Russian or Korean studio portrait is not a failure to relax or an indication of unhappiness. It is, rather, the culturally appropriate face, chosen for reasons akin to why a Victorian sitter adopted gravity: the image is intended as a formal document, and a document should project composure and dignity rather than unbridled delight. (While biometric standards now mandate neutral expressions for passport photos almost universally, including in the United States, this modern requirement somewhat diminishes its utility as a sole cultural example, though the underlying cultural preferences often persist in informal contexts.) The pervasive American default of a full, open smile, often mistaken for a universal human expression, is itself a localized custom, so successfully exported by Hollywood and a century of advertising that its originators often forget its specific cultural roots.
Subtle Signals: Proximity, Touch, and Gaze
Beyond overt gestures and facial expressions, the more subtle elements of photographic body language—how bodies arrange themselves in space—also vary sharply across cultures. The anthropologist Edward T. Hall pioneered the field of proxemics, based on his observation that different cultures maintain distinct rules regarding personal space. Hall broadly categorized cultures into "contact cultures," where individuals stand closer and engage in physical touch more readily, and "non-contact cultures," where a greater personal buffer is maintained. He placed Latin Americans and Arabs in the former category, and Northern Europeans and Japanese in the latter. While Hall’s initial categorizations were largely anecdotal, a comprehensive 2017 study comparing 42 countries systematically found that preferred personal distance tracked more closely with factors like age, gender, and even local temperature, rather than neatly falling into regional blocks. What remains undeniably pertinent for photography, however, is the core insight: the expected distance between bodies is learned, it varies significantly, and no single setting is inherently "warmer" or "colder." Each represents a different cultural answer to the fundamental question of how much personal space an individual is afforded.
Physical touch operates with similar variability. In some cultural contexts, a friendly group photograph implicitly invites contact—a hand resting on a shoulder, an arm draped around a waist, faces leaning intimately together. In others, that same casual physical proximity might register as an imposition or an invasion of personal space, resulting in pictures where individuals maintain a distinct, self-contained posture. This variation is real and merits anticipation from photographers. Crucially, it is not predictably derivable from a passport; the most effective approach is to read the cues offered by the individuals in front of the lens, who often communicate their comfort levels through subtle shoulder movements or body orientation long before words are exchanged.
Then there is the gaze. The prevailing Western portrait convention dictates that the subject looks directly into the camera lens, eyes locked on the viewer. This directness is interpreted by the Western eye as confidence, candor, and engagement. In many other cultures, however, a direct stare carries a different cultural charge. When aimed at an elder, a teacher, or anyone of higher social status, a lowered or averted gaze is often the respectful choice, signifying deference and humility. Consequently, a portrait that genuinely honors such cultural norms will not feature the sitter directly confronting the viewer. The averted eyes in an older portrait are not necessarily indicative of shyness or discomfort with the lens; sometimes, they are simply good manners, meticulously frozen in time.
The Studio as a Cultural Crucible: Malian Photography as a Case Study
Wherever formal portraits have historically flourished, entire grammars of posing have developed around them—invented locally and transmitted like cherished recipes. A particularly vivid illustration of this can be found in Bamako, Mali, during the years surrounding its independence from France in 1960. In the celebrated studios of Seydou Keïta and, slightly later, Malick Sidibé, ordinary Malians came to be photographed not merely as they were, but as the people they aspired to be seen as, with the chosen pose forming half of the picture’s narrative.
Keïta, for instance, operated his studio with the precision and intentionality of a theatrical director. He maintained an extensive wardrobe of props, lending them to sitters who could not afford their own: wristwatches, fountain pens, radios, plastic flowers, European suits, and even his personal Vespa, one of the first scooters in the neighborhood. He meticulously arranged the drape of a robe, precisely angled a hand, selected the optimal camera position, and posed his subjects against patterned cloth backdrops with a precision more akin to a portrait painter than a casual snapshooter. The resulting images powerfully announced a modern, cosmopolitan, and aspirational identity. A Harvard museum exhibition of their work aptly drew its title, "You Look Beautiful Like That," from the encouraging phrase a photographer might use to guide a sitter into the perfect pose.
Sidibé, working in the same city and decade, bent this tradition in a different direction. He initially made his name capturing the vibrant energy of Bamako’s nightclubs and river beaches in the 1960s, famously eschewing stiff, frozen figures. He actively chased movement, capturing young people mid-dance and mid-laugh. Even within the confines of his studio, Sidibé sought bodies in motion, performing an action, rather than merely holding still. Within a single city and a single decade, these two photographers established distinct, sometimes competing, dialects for how a Malian should present themselves before a lens. Multiply this by every studio tradition across the planet, from the painted backdrops of colonial-era portrait houses to the minimalist vinyl seamless backdrops of modern headshot bays, and one begins to grasp the profound extent to which "natural" posing is, in reality, a deeply ingrained local house style.
Modern Dynamics: Poses in the Digital Age
New cultural dialects of posing continue to be invented, but their spread now occurs in months rather than decades. The most prominent recent example is the Korean finger heart, a tiny heart shape formed by pinching the pad of the thumb against the side of the bent index finger. While its exact origin remains debated, with early public use often traced to actress Kim Hye-soo around 2010, its propagation engine is beyond doubt: K-pop. Korean pop idols adopted it as a succinct symbol of love directed at their fans, flashing it at every concert, fan meeting, and promotional photoshoot. The global machinery of Korean pop culture—driven by social media, music videos, and fan engagement platforms—carried this gesture to phones and screens worldwide within a mere few years. A gesture that once might have required a generation to cross an ocean now accomplishes the feat within a single news cycle, underscoring the accelerated pace of cultural transmission in the digital age.
For anyone who photographs people, whether professionally or casually, the lesson is profoundly practical. The pose a subject instinctively adopts is a rich piece of cultural information, not an error to be corrected. If engaging in travel or documentary photography, anticipate that these reflexive poses will shift with every border crossing, and recognize that one’s own photographic instincts are equally localized. Whether handing someone a smartphone, a Fujifilm X100VI on a bustling market street, or a Sony a7 IV in a rented studio, the body that arranges itself in front of the camera’s glass is operating on a script that the photographer did not write.
Directing that body effectively is a genuine skill. The true challenge is not merely eliciting a smile, but rather discerning the subtle differences between the face a subject is performing and the face they genuinely inhabit. This often-imperceptible gap between the manufactured expression and the authentic one forms the entire subject of specialized headshot courses, like those taught by Peter Hurley. This gap exists in every culture, even though the specific default "masks" differ significantly from one to the next. The mask is precisely where the local dialect resides. Learning to see past it, and equally importantly, knowing when to respectfully leave it exactly where it is, is what distinguishes a portrait that merely flatters a stranger from one that authentically reveals them.
So, the next time a group spontaneously throws up two fingers, maintains a flat, neutral stare, or pinches a thumb and finger into a heart, recognize that you are not observing a mere quirk or an arbitrary gesture. You are witnessing a culture in action, teaching a body how to be seen and how to present itself to the world. This instruction might be centuries old in some countries and only a few years old in others, but it is never insignificant, and it is never universal. Every border crossed subtly rewrites this script, and the camera, an indifferent yet precise recorder, faithfully captures whichever version of human expression it is handed.
