Why Some People Tell More in Front of the Camera Than Others
Sometimes the inspiration for an article comes from a museum, sometimes from a book. And sometimes from “Affari tuoi”.
The Rai 1 show is not exactly an intellectual heavyweight. People choose boxes, hope to win as much money as possible, and every now and then have to decide whether to trust the offers made by the mysterious “Dottore”. The concept is straightforward enough. But the real entertainment happens elsewhere anyway: in the contestants’ faces. “Affari tuoi” thrives on emotion. We are meant to see the hope when a box is opened, the disappointment when a large sum disappears, the relief, the joy, the tension. Accordingly, the director frequently shows the contestants’ faces in close-up. For someone who works professionally with faces, that can sometimes be more interesting than the game itself.
A few days ago, it was particularly interesting. One contestant had a range of facial expression that went far beyond the expected categories of joy and disappointment. Surprise, scepticism, mistrust, hope, doubt, uncertainty, relief, defiance – and what felt like a hundred states and shades in between, intense, immediate and sometimes changing within seconds. At some point I caught myself barely following the game anymore. I was watching her face.
What fascinated me was not a succession of spectacular grimaces. Quite the opposite. It was the gradations. A tiny change around the eyes, a movement of the eyebrows, a different tension around the mouth – and suddenly the face was telling a different story.
As a photographer, I know this phenomenon. People differ enormously in front of the camera, and that is neither good nor bad in itself. Some have extraordinary body awareness. Others have a presence that allows a completely still posture to carry an image. Some move intuitively within the light; others have an astonishing sense of lines and forms. And then there are people whose particular strength is their face.
I once worked with a model named Anna who fascinated me for precisely this reason. With very small changes in her facial expression, she could completely alter the mood of an image. Her body remained almost unchanged, the pose was the same – and yet suddenly it was a different picture. With other people, expression works more through posture, movement, head position or bodily tension. A model for a strongly graphic study of the body does not, after all, need the same abilities as one for a tight, psychologically oriented portrait.
That is precisely why I became interested in this particular ability. Why do some people possess such an astonishing repertoire of facial nuances? Is it talent, physical predisposition or learned control? Can it be trained? What role does acting training play? Is it related to intelligence? And what happens when Botox immobilises precisely those muscles with which we produce some of these nuances?
So I started looking for studies.
Can You Be Good at Facial Expression?
The short answer is: apparently, yes.
Surprisingly, the ability to deliberately express emotions with one’s own face has been studied far less extensively than the ability to recognise emotions in other people’s faces. Yet the question seems obvious: if people differ in how well they can read facial expressions, why should they all be equally good at communicating through their own faces?
A 2024 study examined precisely this. Participants were asked to deliberately portray joy, sadness, fear, anger, disgust and surprise, among other emotions. The results suggested something that could, in simplified terms, be described as a general ability for facial expression. Some people were better than others at expressing desired emotions across different tasks. At the same time, there were emotion-specific differences: someone who can convincingly portray one emotion is not necessarily equally good at portraying all the others.
At first glance, this sounds a little like the kind of scientific finding that requires considerable research effort only to establish what any photographer suspects after three shoots. Yet it becomes interesting on closer inspection. The participants were not only asked to portray emotions but also to deliberately perform individual facial movements: raising or drawing together the eyebrows, wrinkling the nose, or making particular movements with the mouth. Here too, substantial individual differences emerged. The ability to portray emotions is therefore related, among other things, to conscious control of one’s own face.
This makes the vague impression that “she simply has great facial expression” somewhat more precise. Some people really can control their faces in a more differentiated way than others. Not necessarily more strongly, but more precisely. An intense expression, after all, is not necessarily a nuanced one.
As a photographer, I find the spaces between the major categories far more interesting anyway: disappointment, hurt, resignation, suppressed anger, mistrust, the attempt to conceal an injury. Or that peculiar moment when you already know something is lost but have not yet admitted it to yourself. These are not six neatly labelled drawers in a face.
The Problem with the Six Faces
For decades, emotion research has worked extensively with so-called basic emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust and surprise. These are associated with those almost iconic facial expressions familiar from psychology textbooks. For a photographer, there is a certain danger in this. One might conclude that an emotion has one particular facial expression and merely needs to be summoned correctly.
Reality is considerably messier. One particularly interesting study therefore worked with professional actors and did not simply instruct them to “be angry”. Instead, they were given specific situations to imagine themselves in. Researchers then analysed the facial configurations they actually used. The results showed considerable variation. The same emotional category was by no means always portrayed with the same stereotypical face; reasonably consistent patterns appeared only for some emotions. Context played a significant role.
Any photographer could probably have worked that out. “Look sad” is not a particularly good direction. Why are you sad? What happened? Who is standing opposite you? Is that person allowed to see that you are hurt? Do you want sympathy, or is sympathy the very last thing you want? Did it happen moments ago, or twenty years ago?
A face does not exist independently of a story. That is why, when working with expression-oriented images, I prefer situations to emotion labels. Not: “Look angry.” Instead: “You have just found out that someone has lied to you. He is standing in front of you. You know he is lying. But he does not yet know that you know.” Suddenly there is no longer the face of anger. Observation, mistrust, hurt, contempt and perhaps even a smile can appear simultaneously.
This also helps explain why acting training can be so interesting for certain kinds of photographic work. A systematic review published in 2026 covering 32 studies suggests overall that acting training can enhance abilities related to emotion recognition and emotional expression, although the studies differ methodologically and certainly do not provide a simple magic formula.
I regularly work with Susi, a professionally trained actress, and there is something about her that at first seems almost unspectacular: she does not do much. But what she does is right. She does not need large changes in her face to alter the effect of an image. Sometimes a slight tension around the mouth, a change in the gaze or a barely perceptible movement of the eyebrows is enough. What is interesting is not merely that she can use these changes deliberately. She also seems to know how little is necessary.
Perhaps that is an essential part of acting experience: not producing as much expression as possible, but knowing how to dose it. To me, the interesting ability of a good actress is not the capacity to produce particularly large expressions on command. At worst, that would be theatre frozen into a still image and about as subtle as a traffic sign. What is interesting is the ability to translate an imagined situation into an inner state and make that state visible from the outside.
Expressive power is not the same thing as expressive volume.
And Does It Have Anything to Do with Intelligence?
It would be tempting to assume that an intelligent person is also particularly skilled at producing nuanced facial signals or reading them in others. Research does not make things quite that convenient.
A large meta-analysis covering 133 samples did find a positive relationship between general intelligence and the ability to recognise emotions. With a correlation of approximately r = 0.19, however, the association was relatively small. Studies of the ability to produce facial expressions have likewise found only weak relationships with general cognitive abilities. A high IQ, apparently, does not automatically provide a face with a hundred control knobs.
How different the underlying abilities can be became clear to me through a psychologist I know. She is highly intelligent but had considerable difficulty understanding other people’s facial signals intuitively. So she did something that probably suits a psychologist rather well: she learned facial expressions systematically.
Which muscles are activated in a particular expression? What happens to the eyebrows, the eyelids, the area around the mouth? Which movements occur together? What other people largely perceive unconsciously, she broke down into rules and learned those rules. This is, of course, a personal observation rather than a scientific study. But it illustrates rather nicely that general intelligence, the intuitive recognition of emotional facial expressions and the ability to produce differentiated expressions oneself are different things.
Perhaps there are different ways of reading a face as well. One person sees an expression and understands it immediately. Another analyses it. Both may ultimately arrive at a similar interpretation; only the route is different.
When Faces Had to Speak Louder
When thinking about facial expression and photography, it is worth taking a detour into the history of film. Silent cinema lacked one crucial source of information: spoken language. Feelings, relationships and intentions therefore had to be communicated more strongly through visual means – posture, gesture and facial expression.
Early silent cinema in particular borrowed extensively from theatre, pantomime and other established performance conventions. Movements were larger, gestures clearer, and emotions can appear remarkably demonstrative to contemporary eyes. Even so, the equation “silent film = grimacing” would be wrong. As cinema developed a visual language of its own, acting changed with it.
The camera could do something unavailable to an actor on a stage: it could come closer. With the close-up, a face no longer had to be legible from the back row of a theatre. A tiny movement could fill an entire screen. Performance consequently became increasingly restrained and naturalistic. A large gesture that works perfectly from twenty metres away can look grotesque in close-up. In return, the camera reveals things nobody in a theatre audience would notice: a brief tightening of the mouth, a minimal movement of the eyebrows, a glance that slips away for a fraction of a second.
This also places my observation of Susi in a broader context. In front of a camera, restraint is not a lack of expression. It may be precisely what makes expression possible. The closer the camera comes, the less a face has to do – but the more important what little it does becomes.
A Face Can Be Taken Apart
What we perceive as a single facial expression actually consists of many small individual movements. To describe these systematically, Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen developed the Facial Action Coding System, or FACS. It does not initially judge whether someone looks “sad”, “angry” or “sceptical”. It describes what the face is actually doing.
These movements are described as Action Units: the inner ends of the eyebrows rise, the brows draw together, the upper eyelid rises, the lower lid tightens, the corners of the mouth move, the lips press together, the nose wrinkles. Individual movements form combinations, and from those combinations we in turn read something that we interpret as emotional expression.
This also gives us a language for something photographers observe intuitively: a tiny change can suddenly shift the meaning of a portrait. A slightly tighter lower eyelid, a minimal movement of the eyebrows, a little more tension around the mouth – sometimes we are talking about millimetres. Yet openness can become scepticism, scepticism can become mistrust, and mistrust can become hurt.
Perhaps that is why the comparison with a musical instrument is not such a bad one. A face has many keys. Not everyone can operate every one of them equally well; some movements are easier to control consciously than others, and some people can control individual areas of their face with astonishing independence. But here too, the point is not to press as many keys as possible as forcefully as possible.
Which brings us to a subject that at first seems like a digression: Botox.
When Some of the Keys Are Silenced
Botulinum toxin is injected into specific facial muscles and temporarily reduces their activity. That is precisely why wrinkles diminish: the muscle that produces them through movement moves less. The only problem is that the muscle is not exclusively responsible for wrinkles. It is also part of the instrument with which we communicate facially.
This certainly does not mean that a Botox-treated face suddenly becomes expressionless. The popular idea of the completely “frozen face” is too simplistic. Scientific studies suggest instead that some facial signals may be affected more strongly than others. A recent study of the upper face, for example, found changes in the perception of anger and surprise, while other emotional expressions were considerably less affected.
Treatment of the glabella, the area between the eyebrows, affects among other things the muscles with which we draw the brows together. In one study, people were photographed before and after such treatment. Independent observers subsequently judged the faces as, among other things, less angry and less fearful. Facial expression is therefore not necessarily erased. But some words may be removed from its vocabulary.
For cosmetic purposes, that may be precisely the desired effect. In acting and expression-oriented photography, however, the matter takes on another dimension. A wrinkle is not necessarily a flaw there. It can be information.
Hollywood’s Little Dilemma
The film industry noticed this conflict decades ago. As early as 2003, the “Observer” reported on casting directors and filmmakers who described difficulties with heavily Botox-treated actors. The problem was said to become particularly apparent in close-ups – precisely where small changes in facial expression matter most.
In 2009, Australian casting director Alison Telford described an almost more awkward effect: when a face moves conspicuously little, she stops following the character and starts watching to see whether the face moves at all. At that point, the cosmetic procedure has achieved a remarkable feat of acting: it has made itself the main character.
And the issue has not disappeared. In 2026, director Nicole Ackermann described her experiences casting a film role in the “Los Angeles Times”. She had reviewed hundreds of North American actresses between the ages of 30 and 40. The small transitions between joy, fear, uncertainty, sadness and longing that she needed for the character were, she said, barely visible in many faces. She attributed this to Botox and other cosmetic procedures. That is one director’s experience, not a scientific study – but it fits remarkably well with the experimental findings.
Behind it lies a rather absurd paradox. Actresses in particular have been under enormous pressure for decades to look young for as long as possible. Visible ageing can cost roles. Under those conditions, cosmetic procedures can almost appear to be a professional investment. Yet the same investment may impair precisely the instrument with which they practise their profession.
At its most extreme, Hollywood is therefore asking for two things at once: Please do not age – but please keep moving your face.
Sometimes an industry makes demands so contradictory that even the facial muscles no longer know what they are supposed to do.
The Camera Sees the Millimetres
The same principle applies to photography, although not to every kind of image. In a strongly graphic study of the body, it may be completely irrelevant whether a model can control the muscles between the eyebrows with particular subtlety. In a tight portrait, that tiny movement may be decisive. This does not automatically make a model with a wide expressive range a better model. Body awareness, posture, movement, presence, patience and an understanding of light may be just as important or more important to an image.
When expression is the subject, however, it is worth looking more closely as a photographer – and perhaps directing a little less. “Look sad. Now angry. A little friendlier.” At worst, this produces exactly the standardised faces we subsequently wonder about.
A situation, an idea, a small story is more interesting: “You have just found out that he lied to you. He is standing in front of you. You know. But he does not yet know that you know.” And then you watch. Perhaps the decisive expression does not appear where you expect it at all, but between two deliberately assumed states, in that brief instant when the face moves from one to the other.
And that brings me back to “Affari tuoi”. The camera there is practically sitting inside the contestants’ faces. It waits for hope and disappointment because that is precisely what drives the programme’s drama. With that particular contestant, it got considerably more: surprise, scepticism, doubt, mistrust, expectation, relief, defiance, uncertainty – and all those tiny transitions for which our language sometimes does not even have a suitable single word.
Perhaps that was exactly what fascinated me. Not that her face did so much, but that so much was happening within it.
Between joy and disappointment there were not two facial expressions.
There was an entire landscape.