Exceptional Technologies by Dominic Smith

Author:Dominic Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

2 ‘Pictorial statistics’: Francis Galton’s composite photography

Let us now move to consider a different case study: Francis Galton’s ‘composite photography’. This practice developed as a supplement to Galton’s work in statistics and, most notoriously, to his work in eugenics.13 Introduced in 1877, composite photography remained an important part of Galton’s work until his death in 1911. For him, the practice confirmed the theory of racial and class types underpinning his eugenics. Today, beyond its importance as a case study for the history of art and photography, Galton’s practice forms a controversial part of the history of disciplines including anthropology, criminology and biometry (Maxwell 2008; Sera-Shriar 2015; Wade 2016).

The aim of this part is to read Galton’s composite photography as an exceptional technological practice. I will focus on the following anomaly: starting out from what he took to be rigorously empirical premises, Galton’s practice produced speculative images of ‘types’ that were unverifiable and unfalsifiable. What is exceptional about Galton’s practice, then, is this: it is, by its own initial empiricist standards of evidence, a practice that must fail to meet its aim. In turn, this failure raises important issues for areas of contemporary research including facial recognition technologies, bioimaging and data visualization.14

Here is how Galton described his practice:

My method of composite portraiture … consists in throwing the images of different pictures successively upon the same screen, giving to each a proportionate fraction of the total length of exposure required to produce an ordinary photograph; the result being that what is common to all the pictures has been adequately exposed and is retained in the resulting photograph, and what is individual to each of them has been too under exposed to leave any image at all, and consequently disappears. (1900: 135)

Galton’s method typically involved synthesizing between five and ten component photographic portraits of the human face (see Figure 2). Galton did, however, produce images with as few as two components and as many as a hundred, and also experimented with materials including Eadweard Muybridge’s famous ‘Horse in Motion’ series (Ellenbogen 2012: 124–8; Sekula 1986: 45; Galton 1882). From 1877 to 1888, when working most intensively on his practice, Galton developed his technology from a basic wooden rig requiring portraits of relatively fixed scale to a more sophisticated backlit apparatus with a zoom (Figures 3 and 4). Galton’s basic method remained consistent throughout this time, however. First, a pack of photographic portraits was hung in front of a high-end camera. Next, the pack was framed by a brass grid for consistency of framing (Figure 5). Successive portraits were then superimposed upon one another by removing the camera’s cap for a consistent exposure time, and shifting through the pack. In an 1878 lecture to the British Anthropological Institute, Galton mooted an exposure time of 10 seconds per image in the pack (1879a: 133–4).

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