From a young age we are taught to relate the camera to smiling; as babies our spontaneous smiles provoke our parents to photograph us, or if they decide to take our picture they will do all they can to make us smile. As we grow up and ergo begin to make sense of the phrase "say cheese", smiling in front of the camera becomes a convention. In the realms of domestic and social photography, serious expressions are scarce. However, this rule is reversed if we are to consider portraiture practiced within an artistic context, as opposed to a social, domestic or commercial one; portraits which are made to be taken seriously depict people looking serious. Because fine art photography is the field I practice in, I chose to contradict this concept by photographing my subjects in a professional environment (the studio) using professional equipment (large format film) and asking them to smile in way that appears awkward and unnatural, as though they feel it to be wrong to smile within an artistic context.