The Unsmiling Class

Open any private equity firm’s team page and scroll. Forty faces, gray background, quarter turn to the left, and not one of them will meet you with anything resembling pleasure. The jaw is set. The eyes are steady in the manner of a man being informed of a death he had privately expected. Occasionally there is a movement of the mouth of perhaps two millimeters, the facial equivalent of a bond trading a quarter point off par, and all parties understand this to be warmth. Scroll far enough and the faces blur into a single composite person. That is worth noticing, because every one of them sat for that photograph believing it said something particular about him.

Consider what is actually being communicated. A photograph is a claim about a person. This particular claim, repeated across an entire industry with a uniformity no dress code ever achieved, is roughly: I have seen things. I am not going to enjoy this and neither are you. My seriousness is such that it has cost me the ordinary use of my face.

It is worth asking why an industry that prides itself on rational analysis has converged on a facial expression that, anywhere else, would prompt a wellness check.

The defense is always the same, and it is not stupid. Gravity signals competence. Clients are handing over the pension money of municipal firefighters, and they do not want it received with a grin. There is real research behind the intuition. The general finding is that faces read as warm and faces read as dominant are not the same faces, and that observers make these judgments in well under a second, before any information about the person has arrived. Fine. I concede the point entirely. Somewhere near a smile there is a threshold past which a man looks like he is selling something, and past that threshold the money does not follow.

But notice how the argument gets used. It licenses the absence of warmth, not the presence of gravity, and those are different things. The industry has confused refusing to smile with having something serious to say. It is the professional equivalent of speaking slowly in order to sound wise. The technique is available to anyone, which is the problem. A signal that costs nothing to produce carries no information, and a face anyone can make while thinking about lunch is not evidence of judgment.

Here is the tell. The expression is not distributed the way a genuine strategy would be. If the convention were doing real signaling work, calibrated to seniority and to who actually carries the weight, you would expect the managing partners to look grim and the associates to look human. Instead everyone looks grim. That includes the twenty-six-year-old three weeks out of a bank analyst program, whose most harrowing professional experience to date was a broken pivot table at four in the morning. He has adopted the face of a man who has restructured a shipping line. Nobody instructed him. He simply looked at the wall of his superiors and understood what species he was joining.

That is not positioning. That is mimicry, and mimicry on that scale has a different name.

It helps to know where the face came from, because it was not designed. It was inherited. The unsmiling portrait is a nineteenth-century artifact. It was helped along by long early exposure times, though by the 1850s these were a matter of seconds. It was reinforced by a painting convention in which the open mouth belonged to peasants, drunks and the deranged, and by dentistry that gave most sitters little to show off. The rest of the world abandoned all of this by about the middle of the last century, when film got fast and Kodak spent a fortune teaching families that a photograph was a happy occasion. Every other kind of portraiture moved on. Finance did not, and the refusal was not an oversight. The industry wants to look like the older thing. The gray backdrop and the set jaw are a costume worn to suggest an institution that predates your problem and will outlast it. That is a reasonable thing to want to suggest, and a strange thing to attempt with your face.

Then there is the question of what the photograph is optimized for, which almost nobody asks out loud. Look at a wall of finance headshots and ask where else you have seen that exact composition: plain background, direct gaze, no expression, shoulders square. You have seen it in the newspaper, above a caption containing the word “probe.”

The industry has standardized on a portrait that survives its worst possible use, the one that runs beside the enforcement action, the fund collapse, the perp walk. A smiling photograph is unusable in that context, since it reads as either mockery or delusion, and everyone knows it. So the convention quietly hedges against a scandal that has not happened yet. An industry whose portraits are optimized for its own indictment is telling you something about what it expects. It is not telling you it has seen things. It is telling you it expects to be accused of them.

I want to be careful here, because the phrase gets thrown around and should not be. A man with a stern headshot is not mentally ill, and treating a corporate photographic convention as a clinical matter would be both wrong and cheap. The individuals are fine. What is unwell is the organism they make up. Institutions can show, at the collective level, behavior that would be diagnosable in a person: rigid affect, compulsive repetition, and a persistent belief that any display of ordinary human pleasure will be punished. Finance has all three, and it has framed them and hung them on the website.

Compulsive repetition. This is the strangest part. Every firm believes its photograph differentiates it. The gray backdrop, the quarter turn, the arms crossed if the firm is feeling bold, the folded hands if it is feeling approachable, the window with the skyline out of focus behind if it has recently raised a fund. The result is a sector of several thousand institutions whose leaders are visually indistinguishable, all convinced they are conveying something specific. You could shuffle the faces between firms and no client would notice the swap. A convention that produces perfect uniformity while every participant believes he is signaling individual credibility is not a strategy. It is a tic that has been rationalized after the fact, which is precisely how tics survive.

A persistent belief in punishment. Ask anyone in the industry why he does not smile in his photograph. He will not say that he analyzed the evidence and concluded a smile costs him mandates. He will say some version of: it would look unprofessional. Pressed on who exactly would punish him, he cannot name the person. He is deferring to a tribunal that never convenes. The photograph is a defensive crouch against a threat nobody has ever confirmed exists, maintained at the cost of appearing, permanently and to everyone, like a man who has just received bad news from a doctor.

The convention also is not priced the same for everybody, which should bother anyone who defends it on grounds of efficiency. The identical unsmiling frame that reads as authority on a fifty-five-year-old man reads as coldness on a woman thirty years younger. The smile that would correct the impression costs her the seriousness he was never asked to earn. The formal experimental research on this is contested, and I will not pretend otherwise. The accumulated testimony of women who have sat for these photographs is not contested. A standard that charges different people different prices for compliance is not a standard. It is a tax, and it is collected by an institution that cannot name itself.

Notice also what the whole arrangement costs, which is not nothing. Trust is the actual product in this business. Not returns; returns are the promise. The product is a person a stranger is willing to hand money to, repeatedly, across a decade, through at least one stretch in which the numbers look terrible and the only thing keeping the capital in place is the belief that this particular human being will not lie about what happened. And the industry has decided that the best face for this is one that says, before a word is exchanged, that the encounter will be unpleasant. It then spends enormous sums on relationship dinners to undo the impression its own photography created for free.

Anyone who has attended those dinners knows how large the gap is. The people are funny. They are often the most entertaining company at any table in the city, carrying two decades of stories they can only tell with the door closed. Then you look them up the next morning and find a man staring into the middle distance like a hostage. The photograph is the least accurate document the firm produces, which is remarkable for an industry that has compliance review the footnotes of a quarterly letter. There is an arbitrage sitting in plain sight: be the one firm whose website tells the truth about what dinner is like.

The right answer was never the grin, and this is where the defenders claim victory too early. The right answer is the small, unforced thing a competent adult does with his face when he is looking at another person he is glad to see. The muscles around the eye do most of that work, and they are almost impossible to operate deliberately. That is why the fake version is detected instantly by everyone, and why the industry avoids the whole category. A real smile requires actually feeling something at the moment of the shutter, in a room with a stranger holding a light meter, on a Tuesday. That is harder to produce on demand than a scowl. The wall of gray portraits is, in part, a wall of people who were not given a reason.

The most trusted capital allocator of the past half century spent sixty years being photographed mid-laugh, often holding food, and it does not appear to have cost him a single dollar of inflows. The counterexample is right there, permanently available, and the industry has looked at it and concluded that the lesson does not generalize.

Other professions get it wrong in their own directions. Law wears the same face with more books behind it. Medicine, interestingly, mostly does not, having worked out that a frightened patient does not need a portrait of severity. Technology overcorrected into the opposite problem, the man laughing alone at something offscreen, which communicates its own kind of unwellness: I am delighted by nothing in particular and would like you to find that trustworthy.

The fix is embarrassingly cheap.

• Hire a photographer who talks, because the expression is produced by the conversation and not by the camera.
• Shoot enough frames that the tenth one arrives after the sitter has stopped performing.
• Ban the crossed arms, which have never once conveyed authority and have always conveyed a man waiting for an elevator.
• Retire the gray seamless backdrop.
• Then choose the frame in which the person looks like the person, and accept that this will feel, to a room of partners reviewing proofs, alarmingly informal. That feeling is the only real evidence you need that the convention is doing something other than serving the client.

The headshot is the last unhedged position on the page. Everything else in the firm’s public materials has been drafted, reviewed, softened and approved: the strategy language, the track record with its careful vintage disclosures, the biography that turns a mediocre decade into a formative one. The photograph is the one asset nobody thought to audit, and it is currently telling every prospective investor, silently and at no charge, that the man managing the money has not enjoyed anything in some time.

That is the ridiculousness. Not the absence of teeth, but the collective agreement to look afflicted, sustained by thousands of intelligent people who cannot identify who is enforcing it, in the service of a trust they then pay consultants to rebuild.