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"Francis Galton’s Composite Portraits: The Productive Failure of a Scientific

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Francis Galton’s Composite Portraits:

The Productive Failure of a Scientific Experiment

In the late 1870s, Francis Galton, the statistician and inventor of eugenics, began a series of

scientific photographic experiments in what he called “composite portraiture.” Composite

portraits were produced by layering the individual portraits of a given number of people onto

a single photographic plate, through a process of partial exposure of each image.1 Composite

portraiture was for Galton an important tool in his anthropometric studies, and in particular

on his development of statistical formulae by which to interpret these. Galton saw composite

portraits as a form of “pictorial statistics” (“Generic Images” 162), the “pictorial equivalents

of those elaborate statistical tables out of which averages are deduced” (“Generic Images”

163).2 Their scientific value lay in the way they made visible the average, or typical, face

within a particular type, as well as its normal distribution of differences: the “ghost of a trace

of individual peculiarities” (Inquiries into Human Faculty 7). Thus while composite portraits

allowed us to see “generic pictures of man, such as Quetelet obtained in outline by the

ordinary numerical methods of statistics” (“Generic Images” 162), they were more accurate

                                                                                                                       
1
Galton explained his method for producing composite portraits in “Composite Portraits Made by Combining
Those of Many Different Persons Into a Single Figure”: “Suppose that there are eight portraits in the pack, and
that under existing circumstances it would require an exposure of eighty seconds to give an exact photographic
2
Although composite portraiture is rarely considered in histories of statistics, in general, Galton himself is
recognised to have made an important contribution to this field—on the basis of his theorisation of normal
distribution, in which his experiments in composite portraiture played a central role. As Daniel Kevles argues,
before Galton: “The word ‘statistics’ denoted . . . ‘state’ numbers—indices of population, trade, manufacture
and the like” while “the practice of statistics consisted mainly of the accumulation of socially useful numerical
data, with neither theoretical underpinning nor mathematical analysis” (13). The significance of Galton’s work
in the development of statistics as an analytical field, Kevles notes, was in reframing what had been formerly
understood as laws of probable error as that of normal distribution, thereby reconceptualising “the Gaussian [or
normal] distribution not primarily as a way of differentiating true values from false ones but as a tool for
analyzing populations in terms of their members’ variations from a mean—the kind of variations inevitably
manifest in, for example, the heights and weights of a large, randomly selected group of people” (13).
   2

and nuanced “than averages, because they include the features of every individual of whom

they are composed” (“Generic Images” 163). Starting with a series of composites of

prisoners, made from identity photographs donated by the Director-General of prisons,

Galton subsequently produced portraits of: tubercular patients in London hospitals, in a

“pictorial study” of 400 subjects whose photographs he commissioned; Jewish boys,

photographed at the Jews’ Free School in London by Galton himself; members of the same

family, for which he often relied on photographs donated by members of the public; as well

as men of science and railway engineers. [See figure 1.] The centre of each portrait, where

the image was strongest and clearest, made visible the mean features of that type. These

features were held in common by the greatest number of subjects within that group, and so

were the most clearly impressed upon the photographic plate. The hazy area around the

centre of each portrait represented those features—the more shadowy as they were more

rare—that deviated from the mean. In composite portraiture, as Alan Sekula recognises, “the

bell curve wore a human face” (Sekula 48).

Galton would work with composite portraiture for the rest of his life: it played a central role

in both his anthropometric research, and later the development of his eugenics theories. It

represents a sort of layering or composite of his own branches of research, and the difficulty

of reconciling these into a fixed and unified program. This article examines the significance

of Galton’s experiments in composite photography, both in terms of his own research agenda,

and the wider cultural formations of which these were a part. In so doing, it will approach the

constitutive haziness of Galton’s composite portraits not as the product of a conceptual

incoherence but of a theoretical overlaying, a kind of ontological blurriness in which new

ideas about human evolution and biological inheritance do not map seamlessly over Galton’s

emergent work on eugenics, his background in anthropometrics, and his ongoing work in
   3

statistical analysis. To compose a history of Galton’s composite portraiture is hence to

produce a composite of one’s own. Such a history demonstrates the extent to which

biological, mathematical and cultural epistemologies intersected and informed one another

during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This history thus needs to take into

account such diverse elements as practices and histories of collecting anthropometric data,

the scientific research on and theories about the meaning of that data emergent in the new

field of biology, but also the emergence and cultural impact of new visual technologies in the

public sphere and their role in the cultural imaginary, as well as the widespread and

enthusiastic popular adoption of practices of self-measurement and self-improvement in

popular culture.

If composite portraiture has received so little attention within the context of the history of

statistical analysis and scientific photography, it should be acknowledged that this is because

it was, by any measure, a resounding failure as a scientific project. Indeed, it was a failure in

a number of quite different ways.3 To begin with, composite portraiture was never widely

adopted as part of scientific or institutional practice. Although Galton is still recognised for

his contribution to statistics, composite portraiture had almost no uptake amongst other

scientists or even anthropometricians of the day, with the notable exception of Galton’s

protégé and lifelong collaborator, Karl Pearson, as well as a small number of American

eugenicists in the 1920s.4 The role it played in the development of his research is never taken

seriously—or even really considered—by historians of statistics. Institutionally, although

                                                                                                                       
3
Galton’s composite portraits have recently been the subject of a number of excellent studies. It is striking,
however, that all of these focus on their significance to histories of (scientific) photography and visual culture,
rather than science or statistics. Examples of such work, to which this paper is indebted, include: Alan Sekula’s
“The Body and the Archive,” Josh Ellenbogen’s Reasoned and Unreasoned Images: The Photography of
Bertillon, Galton, and Marey and Anne Maxwell’s Picture Imperfect: Photography and Eugenics, 1870-1940.
4
Foremost amongst these was Henry Pickering Bowditch. Bowditch was a contemporary of Galton’s, who died
in the same year (1911). He was Dean of the Harvard Medical School, undertook composite studies of
Bostonian physicians as well as soldiers. He published an article “Are Composite Photographs Typical
Pictures?” in McClure’s in 1894, and his composite portraits were exhibited after his death at the Second
International Congress of Eugenics in New York in 1921.
   4

Josh Ellenbogen claims that Galton’s composite portraiture was “making inroads into

France” in the mid 1880s, and Alan Sekula asserts that composite images “proliferated

widely over the following three decades” (40), enjoying “a wide prestige until about 1915”

(52), there is scant evidence of any systematic application of Galton’s work or any uptake

within related areas of scientific research. Finally, even within the context of his own private

research, composite portraiture served rather to undermine than substantiate the

anthropometric and physiognomic theories Galton intended them to illustrate, as we will see

below.

And yet, Galton’s experiments with composite portraiture were, nonetheless, extraordinarily

culturally productive—albeit not in the ways that mattered most to Galton himself. His work

would play a significant role in popularising photography as a tool for the production of

scientific images, not because they were seen to have an important scientific value in

themselves, but rather because the “ghostly” quality Galton recognised in these resonated

with a widespread public interest in images of spirits and other phenomena not visible to the

human eye. Photography, in the late nineteenth century, was producing new images and new

ways of seeing, and composite photography, precisely because its hazy portraits of ghostly

types were so haunting to the nineteenth-century imaginary, played an important part in this.5

The real cultural impact of composite photography, however, is a result of Galton’s chief

limitation in his research: in the 1870s and 1880s, when Galton was undertaking his work in

composite photography, cameras were not yet common and printing photographs still

difficult and expensive. Galton accordingly relied on an extensive network of collaborators

to acquire sufficient photographic portraits to produce his composites, as well as a great deal
                                                                                                                       
5
Galton’s early papers demonstrate that he began by exploring the capacity of a number of visual technologies
to produce composite portraits, before quickly settling on photography. These included the stereoscope
(although this could only combine two images at a time), an “Iceland spar” and several devices of his own
invention. A discussion of the relative merits of these can be found in his article on “Composite Portraits” in
Nature, May 23 1878, 98-99.
   5

of voluntary support and good will. This, in turn, required Galton to inspire a willingness to

participate amongst a general public as well as professional colleagues. It is in this respect—

the creation of a culture of participatory anthropometrics—that composite portraiture would

be most influential. It is, accordingly, on the productive failure of composite portraiture as a

scientific experiment, and its subsequent wider cultural impact, on which this paper will

focus.

The First Failure of Composite Portraiture: Transformations in Scientific imaging

Galton worked with composite portraiture all his life. In the early part of his career, he saw it

as an integral part of his anthropometric research; later it would play a key role in his

elaboration of his eugenics theories. His earliest writing on the subject was published in

Nature in May 1878; his final article appeared almost thirty years later in the same journal: a

1906 request for amateur or professional photographers to send him “waste photographic

portraits,” for the “research on resemblance” he was undertaking for his work in eugenics

(“Request for Prints of Photographic Portraits,” Nature, April 15). Galton’s experiments with

composite portraiture developed alongside his work with the Anthropometric and Racial

Committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The aim of the

Anthropometric and Racial Committee was “to compile data on the physical characteristics of

human beings in the British Empire,” Anne Maxwell notes, “and to publish photographs of

the typical races to be found there” (97). While “the committee’s reports show that within

five years some 24, 000 physical observations . . . had been collected,” Anne Maxwell notes,

the collection of photographs proved considerably more difficult. Only 400 photographs

were amassed during the same period of time, and many of these “were purchased from

professional photographers and were commercial in style” (97). After a short period
   6

associated with the Anthropometric and Racial Committee, Galton spent the rest of his life

engaged in private research.

Despite these impediments, scientific photographic projects played a significant role in the

history and development of photography—just as photography is recognised to have

contributed to transformations in scientific imaging in the second half of the nineteenth

century. Scientists were amongst the earliest adopters of photography, and many of Galton’s

contemporaries also used it as an important visualising tool. One of the first of these was the

botanist Anna Atkins, who made cyanotypes photograms of algae. These were contact

printed images made by placing the algae directly onto cyanotype paper, and published in

Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (making these amongst the first

photographs published in book form). Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne’s photographs of

facial expression stimulated by electric rods, published in Mécanisme de la physionomie

humaine, ou Analyse électro-physiologique de l'expression des passions applicable à la

pratique des arts plastiques (1862), were reproduced in altered form in Darwin’s The

Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animal (1872).6 The Medical and Surgical History

of the War of the Rebellion, 1861-65, published by U.S. Government Printing Office in six

volumes between 1870 and 1888, used photographs as a means by which to disseminate

medical information. The photographs of Étienne-Jules Marey and Eedweard Muybridge,

who were both experimenting with high-speed sequential images of people and animals in

motion, were not intended to illustrate existing knowledge, but to produce new knowledge.

[See figure 2]. Using the new visual technology of photography, they made visible the

mechanics of movement imperceptible to the unaided human eye. Like Galton’s composites,

                                                                                                                       
6
As Prodger notes, Darwin’s book provides one of the earliest instances of manipulated photographs, as Darwin
had erased from Duchenne’s original photographs the electric devices that were used to produce each
expression, thereby suggesting that these were naturally occurring.
   7

the photographs of Marey have a hazy, blurred quality, the trace of movement captured on

sensitized plates and paper.

Even in this context, however, in the decades when photography was still so new that all uses

of it were still experimental, Galton’s project was already at odds with the terms on which

photography was becoming established as a tool for scientific research. The great promise of

photography for scientists in the late-nineteenth century derived from its mechanical

objectivity, the way it was seen to provide, for the first time, an image that was “a perfect and

faithful record of nature” (Maxwell 50). This was what Galton appreciated in photography,

too, its “mechanical precision” (“Composite Portraits” 97). His composites were produced

“independent of the fancy of the operator, just as numerical averages are” (“An Inquiry into

the Physiognomy of Phthisis by the Method of ‘Composite Portraiture’” 478-79; original

emphasis). Yet they were also, and very obviously, the product of manipulation. His

manufacture of family portraits, for instance, struck his Victorian audiences as strange or

uncanny: “I have made several family portraits, which to my eye seem great successes, but

must candidly own that the persons whose portraits are blended together seldom seem to care

much for the result, except as a curiosity,” he wrote in one of his final publications, Essays in

Eugenics (1909). “We are all inclined to assert our individuality, and to stand on our own

basis, and to object to being mixed up indiscriminately with others” (49). In mixing the

portraits of individuals indiscriminately together, Galton produced imaginary figures: as Alan

Sekula argues, they were the “photographic impression of an abstract, statistically defined,

and empirically non-existent criminal face” (19). Their claim to be mechanically produced

and objective images was compromised by Galton’s incremental exposure of the

photographic plate with a series of portraits. In manipulating the composition of the

photograph in this way, Galton’s photographs veered closely to the composites produced by
   8

spirit photographers—who captured images of ghosts and ectoplasm—and others

experimenting with photography as a medium of popular entertainment.

Although it is often customary to associate the emergence of photography with the rise of

“objective” images, in fact the applications of photography were bifurcated from the very

start: appreciated for its realism and mechanical production, on the one hand, but also

enjoyed for its manipulation or play with images, on the other. While both facets of the

popular reception of photography must be borne in mind if we are to understand its cultural

impact, this bifurcation was also used to distinguish scientific from entertaining images.

Galton’s composites, by interfering so extensively with the resulting photographic portrait,

fell on the wrong side of this distinction to be taken seriously as scientific image. As Daston

and Galison have so insightfully shown, the emergence of modern scientific objectivity was

facilitated by the development of new imaging technologies which transformed scientific

illustration, and its role in the production of scientific knowledge (see also Crarey 2002).

Until the early nineteenth century, Daston and Galison argue, scientific illustrators:

were united in the view that what the image represented, or ought to represent, was

not the actual individual specimen before them but an idealised, perfected, or at least

characteristic exemplar of a species or other natural kind. . . . They defended the

realism—the “truth-to-nature”—of underlying types and regularities against the

naturalism of the individual object, with all its misleading idiosyncrasies (Objectivity

42).

This kind of illustration required not a mechanical instrument, but on the contrary the trained

eye of the scientific illustrator, able to discern the outlines of the general types within the

hazier contours of its individual expression. Here the purpose of scientific illustration is to

identify the type within the profusion of its various particularities.

   9

This is precisely the way in which Galton was attempting to use the photographic camera: to

produce generic images of different “types.” The purpose of composite portraiture, he

argued, was:

to obtain with mechanical precision a generalised picture; one that represents no man

in particular, but portrays an imaginary figure possessing the average features of any

group of men. These ideal faces have a surprising air of reality. Nobody who glanced

at them for the first time would doubt its being the likeness of any living person, yet .

. . it is no such thing; it is the portrait of a type and not an individual (“Composite

Portraits” 97).

However, Galton valued photography because it allowed him to do this with “mechanical

precision,” just as statistics enabled him to do it with numerical accuracy. In this way, Galton

was thus also swayed by the new trends Daston and Galison identify as emergent in the mid-

nineteenth century, when “new, self-consciously ‘objective ways of making images were

adopted by scientific atlas makers. These new methods aimed at automatism: to produce

images ‘untouched by human hands,’ neither the artist’s nor the scientist’s. Sometimes but

not always, photography was the preferred medium for these ‘objective images’” (Objectivity

42). Although Galton used the photographic camera for precisely this reason—for the

objectivity of mechanical reproduction it afforded—he also interfered with the image

produced, manipulating this to produce the image of an exemplar or ideal type, rather than an

individual subject, “with all its misleading idiosyncrasies.” In this way, Galton used a new

technology in the service of an older way of seeing.

The Second Failure of Composite Photography: Institutional Applications

   10

A second instance of how this led to the failure of composite portraiture as a scientific

practice can be seen by turning to consider more closely Galton’s first series of composite

portraits: those of prisoners [see figure 1]. Galton explained that the fact his earliest

experiments used photographs of prisoners was largely a matter of contingency: for the

process to work, the original photographs needed to be homogeneous in size and

composition, and Galton had been given a large collection of photographs of prisoners by the

Director-General of prisons, Edmund Du Cane, which were suitably similar in dimension and

style (“Composite Portraits” 98).7 Of course, it is not entirely coincidental that these should

have been Galton’s first available photographs: large institutions with a vested interest in

recording the identities of their inmates were also amongst the early adopters of photography

as a new technology, and Galton’s interest in criminal anthropometrics was already well

known (as we will see further below). While the composite portraits he produced might have

satisfied Galton’s anthropological interest in visualising “really representative faces”

(Inquiries into Human Faculty 6), it is difficult to imagine what their practical application

would have been in an institution like the prison. For Galton, these faces substantiated his

eugenic theories about the biological inheritance of certain traits; however, it is difficult to

see what use averaged or generalised portraits of criminal types would have been to an

institution whose primary purpose was to identify particular, individual criminals. (In a

similar way, it is difficult to see how his portraits of tubercular patients [see figure 1] would

have been of utility for medical practitioners or hospital administrators when deciding how to

treat particular patients. And indeed they were never used diagnostically.)

It is instructive, in this respect, to contrast Galton’s research to that of one of his

contemporaries, who also worked at the juncture of anthropometrics and photography:

                                                                                                                       
7
In his later account of producing composite portraits in Inquiries into Human Faculty, Galton described this
method as “now discarded” (6), and noted a new preference for commissioning and overseeing the original
photographs from which the composites were produced, in order to guarantee their uniformity (11).
   11

Alphonse Bertillon. Bertillon was the head of the Service d’identité judicaire at the Paris

Prefecture of Police, responsible for the management and organisation of the massive

quantities of data being accumulated by the prison system. Bertillon developed the first filing

system for these rapidly expanding police records, creating identity files for anyone arrested

in the greater Paris area and organising the filing system by which their records might be

cross-referenced. Despite the differences in their projects, and despite the fact Bertillon

worked in a large public institution while Galton worked in a loose community of societies

(whose members were mostly affluent gentlemen-scholars), there were many points of

correspondence between the two men. As Josh Ellenbogen recognises:

Galton’s work in photography took place during almost exactly the same span as

Bertillon’s. His first experiments in the medium date from 1877, just two years

before Bertillon began work at the prefecture, and occupied him until his death in

1911, three years before Bertillon died. Although Bertillon was French and Galton

English, the two operated in the same photographic milieu, deploying the technology

in relation to identity, statistics, and criminology. . . . Galton’s first published

references to Bertillon date to 1884, at just the moment Galtonian photography began

making inroads into France. On a lark, Galton posed for Bertillon when he visited

him in 1893, receiving a mock criminal identity card as a souvenir (77).

[See figure 3]. This collegiality did not prevent Galton writing a rather acerbic review of

Bertillon’s work when it was published in English translation, however. 8 As Alan Sekula

notes, in many ways Galton and Bertillon’s understanding of the relationship between

photography and anthropometrics were fuelled by opposing interests. Rather than seeking to

identify the most statistically prevalent type of each category of criminal, Bertillon’s work

had as its aim the identification of an individual within an increasingly encyclopaedic

                                                                                                                       
8
 Galton’s review of Signaletic Instructions, “The Bertillon System of Identification,” was published in Nature,
October 15, 1896.  
   12

archive: “The projects of Bertillon and Galton constitute two methodological poles of the

positivist attempts to define and regulate social deviance,” Sekula writes. “Bertillon sought

to individuate. His aims were practical and operational, a response to the demands of urban

police work. . . . Galton sought to visualise the generic evidence of hereditarian laws. His

aims were theoretical, the result of eclectic but ultimately single-minded curiosities of one of

the last Victorian gentlemen-amateur scientists” (19). Where Galton was a “compulsive

quantifier” Bertillon was a “compulsive systematiser” (Sekula 40). Where Galton attempted

to reduce the archive to “a single potent image” (Sekula 54), Bertillon “sought not to relate

individual to species, but to extract the individual from the species” (Sekula 27). Between

these two approaches, Bertillon’s was incomparably the more influential, used as part of the

training of all incoming members of the French police force in his day (Ellenbogen 115).

Galton’s composite portraits, on the other hand, would leave little trace in the scientific

cultures of his time.9

The Third Failure of Composite Photography: Criminal Anthropology

To judge the success or failure of composite portraiture by the extent to its institutional

uptake is, however, to measure it by a standard to which Galton himself was largely

indifferent: unlike Bertillon, Galton was not employed by a public institution, and, like many

scientists of his time, his research was self-funded and driven purely by his own interests,

which were theoretical, rather than practical. Even here, however, it has to be noted that

composite portraiture did not prove helpful to Galton’s research, and in fact served to

complicate the theories it was intended to substantiate. In what was perhaps the most

significant of its failures, composite portraiture came to undermine the physiognomic theories

                                                                                                                       
9
 In a curious epigraph to this history, as Ellenbogen notes, it was Galton who “helped introduce the
individuation technology that later replaced Bertillonage—fingerprinting. To Bertillon’s dismay, fingerprinting
increasingly forced his system out of major penal systems in the years after 1910” (77).    
   13

that underpinned Galton’s attempt to produce generic portraits of types.10 We can see this

failure played out in one of the few studies not written by Galton that included composite

portraits, Havelock Ellis’s The Criminal (1890). This text attempted to apply Galton’s work

to the nascent field of criminology. The purpose of his book, as Ellis explained in its opening

words, was: “to present to the English reader a critical summary of the results of a science

now commonly called criminal anthropology” (The Criminal 15). In criminal anthropology,

Ellis wrote, physiognomy, and particularly craniometry, was seen to provide the most reliable

method for identifying the “criminal type.” Ellis attempted to illustrate this theory through

the inclusion of several composite portraits commissioned by the physician of the Elmira

Reformatory, Dr Hamilton Wey. [See figure 4].

Despite his evident enthusiasm for Galton’s work, however, Ellis was forced to admit that the

composite portraits had not actually provided any useful information, had revealed no reliable

correspondence between physiognomy and criminality, and had, if anything, undermined the

physiognomic assumptions on which criminal anthropology rests: “the average size of

criminals’ heads is about the same size as ordinary people’s heads,” Ellis acknowledged (The

Criminal 49), and overall: “Nothing very definite can be said of the cephalic indices” (The

Criminal 49). And yet the remainder of the book proceeds as though these cautionary

remarks have never been uttered, discussing the relationship between head shape and

atavistic tendencies towards crime in exactly the terms one would find in the phrenological

tradition Ellis begins by dismissing. In his (favourable) review of Ellis’s book, Galton, too,

argued that: “Although numerous dissections and measurements have led to no well-
                                                                                                                       
10
 Galton rarely questioned whether the body’s dimensions and shape reflected inner character and thus
measured social worth. In this respect, argues Maxwell, Galton’s physiognomic theories were influenced, like
many others of his time, by the work of Johann Casper Lavater. For Lavater: “people’s faces served as indexes
to their underlying moral character” (53). Lavater’s ideas, like Galton’s, gained cultural influence by circulating
popularly as well as in scientific circles—often through the medium of photography: “by the mid-nineteenth
century, his theories had gained commercial application, with photographers and clients equally concerned to
emphasise the physiognomic traits associated with high moral development” (54).
   14

established important fact, they have, however, narrowed the field within which speculation

may legitimately ramble” (“Criminal Anthropology” 75). Galton did not explain the curious

mechanism by which the failure of craniometry to produce useful empirical results in

criminal anthropology constitutes a definition of the proper field of scientific inquiry into

criminality. Similarly, Galton acknowledged that in the composite portraits included in The

Criminal “the outlines of the heads are very hazy, testifying to large and various differences

in the component portraits” which together “show no prevalence for any special deformity in

head or features” (“Criminal Anthropology” 75), without being moved to reflect on how this

might problematize his own belief in a correspondence between head shape and criminal

type. Just as Ellis noted that Franz Gall was, by late nineteenth century a scientist “popularly

known chiefly for his mistakes” (The Criminal 50), the story of composite portraiture is the

story of its failure, but this is a failure that Ellis and Galton both openly acknowledged and,

simultaneously, studiously ignored.

Part of what is revealed in Ellis’s attempt to apply composite portraiture to the field of

criminal anthropology is a certain incoherence in Galton’s underlying conceptualisation of

“the type.” One of the key uses of composite portraiture, Galton argued, was precisely to

identify the various types with which his research was concerned: “it affords an excellent text

whether any given series is generic or not; for when the portraits in the series make a good

and clear composite it shows that medium values are much more frequent than extreme

values, and therefore that the series may be considered a generic one; otherwise it is certainly

not generic” (“On the Application of Composite Portraiture to Anthropological Purposes”

690). One reason composite portraiture was a useful tool in statistical and anthropological

research was thus because it provided the means by which to test whether a cohesive “type”

had been properly identified. If the composite was too blurry, the group was
   15

anthropometrically too diverse for the resulting analysis to be meaningful. In “Generic

Images,” similarly, Galton explained the importance of working with fairly homogenous data

for statistical laws to hold:

The word generic presupposes a genus, that is to say, a collection of individuals who

have much in common, and among whom medium characteristics are very much more

frequent than extreme ones. The same idea if sometimes expressed by the word

typical, which was much used by Quetelet, who was the first to give it a rigorous

interpretation, and whose idea of a type lies at the basis of his statistical views. No

statistician dreams of combining objects into the same generic group that do not

cluster towards a common centre, no more can we compose generic portraits out of

heterogeneous elements, for is the attempt be made to do so the result is monstrous or

meaningless (“Generic Images” 161).

While this may have been his theory, in practice Galton frequently ignored the resistance of

his material to being grouped together as indicative of a particular “type.” This can be seen

in “An Inquiry into the Physiognomy of Phthisis.” In this text, Galton’s assertion that a

biological predisposition for tuberculosis could be detected in particular facial features relies

not on scientific or photographic evidence, but on popular assumption that requires no

interrogation: “the belief that certain physical conformations indicate predispositions to

certain diseases has always held so prominent a place in medicine from the earliest ages that

it is unnecessary to dwell upon its history or its present position at any length” (475). Despite

the fact, as he acknowledges, that “[o]n first examination of the collection of portraits I was

chiefly struck by their diversity” (482), and that this blurriness suggested, according to his

own theories, that the individual portraits did not constitute a “type,” Galton continued to

argue that composite portraiture proves “a strong hereditary tendency to the disease” (483).
   16

The Fourth Failure of Composite Photography: The Idealised Type

There is a further problematisation of Galton’s theory of types by his composite portraits of

criminals. Although Galton was in no doubt that the “criminal classes” were made up of

subjects who served no cultural purpose at all—“They render no useful service, they create

no wealth, they degrade whatever they touch, and as individuals are perhaps incapable of

improvement” (Essays in Eugenics 19-20)—his portraits had the unexpected and rather

perverse outcome of making such subjects better looking:

It will be observed that the features of the composites are much better looking than

those of the components. The special villainous irregularities in the latter have

disappeared and the common humanity that underlies them has prevailed. . . . All the

composites are better looking than their components because the averaged portrait of

many persons is free from the irregularities that variously blemish the looks of each of

them (“Composite Portraits” 97-98).

Here Galton’s theory of composite portraiture is at odds with his theory of the type, even

though it is elsewhere used to support it. While Galton’s work in both composite portraiture

and anthropometrics was motivated by eugenicist concerns—in which some types were

unquestioningly understood as superior to others—here composite portraiture seems to prove

that all types are beautiful, or good, when considered on its own terms. Indeed, Galton

acknowledges as much explicitly at the start of Inquiries into Human Faculty:

The instincts and faculties of different men and races differ in a variety of ways

almost as profoundly as those of animals in different cages of the Zoological Gardens;

and however diverse and antagonistic they are, each may be good of its kind. . . .

[T]he monkey may have a horror at the sight of a snake, and a repugnance to its ways,

but a snake is just as perfect an animal as a monkey. . . . The moral and intellectual

wealth of a nation largely consists in the multifarious variety of the gifts of the men
   17

who compose it, and it would be the very reverse of improvement to make all its

members assimilate to a common type (2).

While the perceived beauty and regularity of his own composite portraits appears to

substantiate precisely this point, for Galton this renders his composites of criminals

“interesting negatively rather than positively,” because “[t]hey reproduce faces of a mean

description, with no villainy written on them. The individual faces are villainous enough, but

they are villainous in different ways, and when they are combined, the individual peculiarities

disappear” (Inquiries into Human Faculty 11). He had similar results with the composite

portraits of Jewish boys photographed at the Jews’ Free School [figure 3]: “They were

children of poor parents, dirty little fellows individually, but wonderfully beautiful, I think, in

these composites” (“Photographic Composites” 243). Rather than concentrating the signs of

the prisoners’ villainy or racial inferiority, composite portraits erased it—a fact which, while

consistent with Galton’s idealisation of the exemplary type, was at odds with his

physiognomic theories, according to which concentrated degeneracy or unfitness should not

be better looking than individual incarnations of it, quite the contrary.

The Legacy of Composite Portraiture: Participatory Anthropometrics and the Rise of

the Quantified Self

Despite the many failures of composite portraiture to prove Galton’s theories or to find an

institutional application, however, it did have a significant cultural impact. To understand

this, however, we need to turn from a focus on the scientific or intellectual context in which

they were produced and to consider the means of their acquisition. As Galton frequently

noted, one of the main impediments to his work in composite portraiture was the difficulty of

sourcing sufficient quantities of photographs. He complains about this from the time of his

earliest experiments in the 1870s, and was still struggling with this over thirty years later,
   18

when he was undertaken his final experiments in the first decade of the 1900s. Collecting

suitable portraits in sufficient quantities was a lifelong effort: “I am sure that the method of

composite portraiture opens a fertile field of research to ethnologists, but I find it very

difficult to do much single-handed, on account of the difficulty of obtaining the necessary

materials” (Inquiries into Human Faculty 9). For this reason, Galton was reliant on working

in collaboration with large institutions like prisons, hospitals and schools, as well as members

of the general public. In order to overcome the difficulty of acquiring sufficient quantities of

photographs, he needed to persuade officials and individuals alike of the value of his

research, and to encourage their involvement. Galton was very public about his need for

help: almost all his essays and lectures on composite portraiture include a “hearty wish that

amateur photographers would seriously take up the subject of composite portraiture”

(Inquiries into Human Faculty 13).

Galton used three key methods to encourage public participation in his various projects to

acquire vast quantities of national anthropometric data. Firstly, he began to publish practical

manuals and record books designed to encourage and guide the collection of family

anthropometrics. In 1883, Galton published the Life History Album, which was intended, as

Anne Maxwell notes, to provide “both a guide for those wishing to create a photographic and

written record of their family’s health, and a template to be filled by those who ordered one

from him” (95). The following year, he published the Record of Family Faculties, launched

“with a public competition featuring large cash prizes for the most complete copies

submitted, in an effort to stimulate ‘a custom of keeping family records’” (Ludgren 13).11

His purpose in publishing these books, Galton explained, was to “further the accumulation of

materials for life histories in the form of adequate photographs, anthropometric

                                                                                                                       
11
Lundgren notes that whereas the Life History Album provided a “detailed biographic register,” the Record of
Family Faculties was “a tool to accumulate more abstract accounts of entire families” (13).  
   19

measurements, and medical facts” (“The Anthropometric Laboratory” 338).12 Secondly,

Galton wrote proposals calling for government institutions like schools to undertake large-

scale collections of anthropometric data. His “Proposal to Apply for Anthropological

Statistics from Schools,” published in 1874, outlined a plan for the mass collection of

anthropometric data—primarily regarding height and weight—amongst what he saw as the

fairly homogenous populations of schools. Galton was successful in soliciting the support of

a number of schools, including “country” schools, such as Marlborough, Clifton, Wellington

and Eton, as well as “town” schools, such as City of London School, Christ’s Hospital, King

Edward’s School in Birmingham and Liverpool College (“On the Height and Weight of Boys

Aged 14, in Town and Country Public Schools” 174). “I do not see why it should be either

difficult or costly to schools of the upper and middle classes,” Galton claimed, “to institute

periodical measurements even of a somewhat elaborate character under skillful itinerant

supervision, and the register them in a methodical and uniform manner. It should, I think,

become a recognized part of the school discipline to have this done” (“On the

Anthropometric Laboratory at the Late International Health Exhibition” 207).

Thirdly, Galton’s encouraged the public to see the collection of their anthropometric data and

its statistical analysis and interpretation as a social responsibility: “No doubt it would be

contrary to the inclinations of most people to take much trouble of the kind about

themselves,” he acknowledges, “but I would urge them do so for their children so far as they

have opportunities, and to establish a family register for the purpose” (“The Anthropometric

Laboratory” 338). To this end, he opened his own Anthropometrics Laboratory. In “Why Do

We Measure Mankind?”, he wondered: “When shall we have anthropometric laboratories,

where a man may from time to time get himself and his children weighed, measured and

                                                                                                                       
12
 In America, notes Kelves, “thousands of people filled out their ‘Record of Family Traits’ and mailed the
forms to the Eugenics Record Office” (38).  
   20

rightly photographed, and have each of their bodily faculties tested, by the best methods

known to modern science?” (332).

In 1884, Galton trialled a temporary anthropometrics laboratory at the International Health

Exhibition in London. This was a great success, with over 9000 attendees queuing for hours

to have a detailed chart of their biometrics measured and recorded.13 The door was “thronged

by applicants waiting patiently for their turn, or after a while turning away seeing it was

almost a hopeless task to wait,” Galton claimed (“On the Anthropometric Laboratory at the

Late International Health Exhibition” 206).14 One of the ways Galton fostered this level of

interest was quite Barnumesque: he charged people for the privilege of participating. For

their fee (3d), they had a detailed set of anthropometrics recorded and were sent home with a

souvenir copy of their report, as “a token of the visitor’s contribution to science as well as

proof of having stood up and been counted, or being represented in an imperative new

statistical aggregate” (Lundgren 12). No doubt there were many visitors at the International

Health Exhibition who saw these reports as novelties rather than solemn scientific records,

but it is certainly evident that Galton’s anthropometric vision caught the cultural imaginary.

In attaching a sense of moral edification to the practice of self-measurement, Galton made

this practice seem appealingly worthy. Galton encouraged the public to see “self-

observation, self-assessment and evaluative comparison as a natural part of responsible life”

(Lundgren 18).

While Galton’s experiments with composite portraiture were not an influential part of his

scientific or statistical research, then, the research this was used to support nonetheless had a

                                                                                                                       
13
Galton claimed the number of participants was 9337, and that each was measured in 17 different ways.
14
Subsequent documents, however, reveal that the number of people who visited the permanent
Anthropometrics Laboratory in London in the first three years of its existence were only a third of this figure.
The atmosphere of an International Exhibition clearly boosted its popularity.
   21

discernible cultural impact. In particular, Galton’s anthropometric projects encouraged a

widespread popular uptake of new practices of self-assessment and an increasingly quantified

view of self and society. After Galton, assessing oneself in relation to statistical norms would

become commonplace, and a key cultural mechanism by which to standardise—that is,

normalise—one’s own body and behaviour. Thus cultural impact of Galton’s work does not

reside in the scientific uptake or application of composite portraiture itself but in the culture

of participatory anthropometrics his work created. Galton made an important and epochal

contribution to the history of anthropometrics by encouraging widespread public participation

and constructing this participation as a new form of social citizenship. In cultivating public

interest and voluntary participation in this work, he reinforced the growing status of

“quantification as a universal cultural value that would set the standard for future public

discourse” (Lundgren 14). The idea that allowing one’s body to be measure was an important

part of social citizenship would be particularly influential in the USA in the first half of the

twentieth century. Two examples of such projects were Sheldon’s work on morphology, and

the Department of Agriculture’s mass measurements of women’s bodies to produce the first

standardised sizing system. (I have also been examining the competition to find “Norma,”

the woman who mostly closely approaches the “average proportions” of the young, white

American woman, held in 1945.) In his campaign to convince members of the general public

to photograph and measure themselves, and to make that data available to surveyors and

anthropometricians, Galton was incredible effective. We might conclude that Galton’s

project to develop composite portraiture was successful in every way except those that

mattered most to Galton himself.

   22

Frontispiece of Galton’s Inquiries into Human Faculty, 1883.

   23

Figure 2 : Étienne-Jules Marey, chronophotograph

   24

Figure 3: Anthropometry card of Francis Galton, with profile and full-face photos and spaces
for key body measurements, taken by Alphonse Bertillon, 1893.
   25

Figure 4: Frontispiece of Havelock Ellis’s The Criminal. Composite photograph of twenty

criminals—“dullards”—in Elmira Reformatory, 1890.
   26

Works Cited  

Bertillon, Alphonse. Identification anthropométrique: Instructions signalétiques. Paris:

Melun, 1892.

Daston, Lorraine and Peter Galison. Objectivity. New York : Zone, 2010.

Ellenbogen, Josh. Reasoned and Unreasoned Images: The Photography of Bertillon, Galton,
and Marey. Penn State University Press, 2012.

Ellis, Havelock. The Criminal. London: Walter Scott, 1890.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London and New York:
Penguin, 1991.

---. The History of Sexuality, Volume One London and New York: Penguin, 1993.

Galton, Francis. Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry Into its Laws and Consequences. London:
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---. “Proposal to Apply for Anthropological Statistics from Schools.” Journal of the
Anthropological Institute 3 (1874): 308-11.

---. “Notes on the Malborough School Statistics.” Journal of the Anthropological Institute.
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---. “On the Height and Weight of Boys Aged 14, in Town and Country Public Schools.”
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---. “Composite Portraits Made by Combining Those of Many Different Persons Into a
Single Figure.” Nature 18 (1878): 97-100.

---. Generic Images. London: William Clowes and Sons, 1879.

---. “On the Application of Composite Portraiture to Anthropological Purposes.” Report of

the British Association for the Advancement of Science 51 (1881): 3.

---. “An Inquiry into the Physiognomy of Phthisis by the Method of ‘Composite
Portraiture.’” Guy's Hospital Reports. Vol 25 (1882): 475-93.

“The Anthropometric Laboratory.” Fortnightly Review 31 (1882): 332-8.

---. Life History Album. London: Macmillan, 1884.

---. Record of Family Faculties London: Macmillan, 1884.

---. “On the Anthropometric Laboratory at the Late International Health Exhibition” Journal
of the Anthropological Institute 14 (1885): 205-18.
   27

---. “Why do we Measure Mankind?” Lippincott's Monthly Magazine 45 (1890): 236-41.

---. “Criminal Anthropology.” Nature 42 (1890): 75-6.

---. Eugenics: “Its Definition, Scope and Aims.” The American Journal of Sociology. 10.1
(1904): 1-25.

---. “Request for Prints of Photographic Portraits,” Nature. Vol 73 (1906): 534.

---. Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development. London: J.M. Dent, 1907. (Second
edition. First edition Macmillan, 1883).

---. “Deterioration of the British race.” Times, June 18, 1909.

---. Essays in Eugenics. London: Eugenics Education Society 1909.

Halberstam, Judith. Skin Show: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham
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Sussex Academic Press, 2008.

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