![]() These are sometimes tacit agreements, obscured behind the image, but their excavation is crucial in fully comprehending the social dynamic the photographs embody. This approach considers the individual photographs used to produce the composites as the products of dialogues between the parties involved in their production and dissemination. To do so, I shift my attention away from an exclusive concern with issues of representation and onto what might be described as photography’s social relations. In this short essay, I hope to cast new light on the family composites: re-inscribing Galton’s non-descript family with socio-cultural specificity, in a manner capable of inverting the logic of a project that aimed to provide a biological footing to cultural definitions. 4) The family composites sit outside the other studies, at the same time serving as an index of the governing concerns at the core of the project. (A similar principle was clear when Galton first presented his criminal composites, moving from a discussion of criminal physiognomy to the observation that there were 576 convicted criminals within the infamous Jukes family in New York. In consequence, the family composites served a useful rhetorical function within a wider thesis centred on the hereditary transmission of moral and intellectual faculties: establishing a relationship through which criminality and insanity were suggested to result in distinct physiognomic templates passed down through generations, much like a daughter inherits her father’s nose. While the majority focused on socio-cultural groups for which Galton aimed to provide a biological grounding, the family pictures focus on biologically determined groupings without direct reference to the socio-cultural identity of those represented. The family images were distinct from the other composite studies. The potential applications of the studies were said to be multiple, including the creation of an ‘ideal family likeness’ and to forecast the likely appearance of children produced by married couples. In 1882, Galton started working on a series of composites showing members of a single family. 2 By the 1880s, the composites had been folded into Galton’s wider eugenics project, which offered the means through which he hoped selective breeding could further ‘the ends of evolution more rapidly and with less distress than if events were left to their own course’. In the process, social categories were reshaped as both biologically determined and ‘readily available in the evidence of the human body’. It divided society into series of distinct groupings, including criminals, Jewish schoolboys and members of the Royal Engineers, suggesting that physical characteristics typical to each group were revealed in the generic images produced by combining portraits of its members. 1 The composite system drew on earlier physiognomic thinking, proposing the face as a sign to be read for the ‘moral and intellectual faculties’ of the sitter. Physical similarities repeated through the group emerged as particularly defined differences grew indistinct. Galton started working on the composites in 1877, exposing a number of mug-shots onto a single photographic plate. ![]() Ben Burbridge returns to Galton’s composite photographs of families, to consider how the social relations involved in their production and distribution provide a window onto issues around class and identity in Victorian culture.įrancis Galton’s composite portraits occupy the dark underbelly of official photo history. The project was premised on the belief that 'moral and intellectual faculties' could be read from a close study of facial features. Francis Galton's composite photographs combined portraits of individuals drawn from particular groups in an effort to reveal physical similarities they shared.
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