Francis Galton invented composite portraits in around 1880.
Galton also devised a technique called composite photography, (produced by superimposing multiple photographic portraits of individuals representing a “natural” kind—like Jewish men, criminals, patients with tuberculosis, etc.—onto the same photographic plate, thereby yielding a blended whole, or “composite”), that he hoped could generalize the facial appearance of his subject into an “average” or “central type.”
This work began in the 1880s while the Jewish scholar studied anthropology and statistics with Francis Galton. Jacobs asked Galton to create a composite photograph of a Jewish type.One of Jacobs' first publications that used Galton's composite imagery was “The Jewish Type, and Galton’s Composite Photographs,”
Galton hoped his technique would aid medical diagnosis, and even criminology through the identification of typical criminal faces. However, after exhaustive experimentation he concluded that such types were not attainable in practice.
‘Photography as such has no identity. Its status as a technology varies with the power relations which invest it. Its nature as a practice depends on the institutions and agents which define it and set it to work. Its function as a mode of cultural production is tied to definite conditions of existence, and its products are meaningful and legible only within the particular currencies they have. Its history has no unity. It is a flickering across a field of institutional spaces. It is this field we must study, not photography itself.’
[Tagg, 1988, p63]
[Tagg, 1988, p63]
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