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GALTON, SIR FRANCIS
throughout the 1860s, and codifi ed it most comprehen-
sively in his 1869 book Hereditary Genius.
By 1873, Galton had begun to seek a way to apply
his insights in a practical manner, and the necessary fi rst
step would be an accounting of the nation’s entire pool
of human resources. Galton attempted to accumulate
data from schools of every rank throughout England,
but when his efforts were received coolly by these
institutions, he turned to an acquaintance, Sir Edward
du Cane, Inspector of Prisons, for assistance. Galton
was furnished with photographs of convicts, which he
quickly sorted into classes based upon the type and
severity of their transgressions. With this raw imagery
at hand, Galton wondered how he could distill the
essential physical attributes of each of these classes,
soon arriving at a novel method. By successively
photographing eight images onto a single plate, in the
same position and with an equal fraction of the nor-
mal exposure time, Galton found that a superimposed
composite of all eight faces could be produced. This
composite portrait was of remarkable value to Galton’s
project, for it obliterated the individual idiosyncracies
of the men, but emphasized those features which they
shared. This photographic enterprise, while techni-
cally innovative, remained conceptually dubious, for
it seemed to confi rm the long-held position, to which
Galton subscribed, that certain physical manifestations
were exterior correlates of mental or even moral states.
Yet, what was most important for Galton was the fact
that the photographic breeding that occurred during the
course of these experiments seemed to offer a predictive
value for the kinds of policies that his eugenics sought
to institute. In an article of 1882, Galton described the
prospective use of these works: “The easiest direction
in which a race can be improved is towards that central
type...there can hardly be a more appropriate method
of discovering the central physiognomical type of any
race or group than of composite portraiture” (Galton,
1883, 10).
Galton’s use of composite photography ultimately
lead to a number of related projects, as when he used
the measure of deviation from this photographically de-
duced “central type” as the basis for a system of indexing
portraits, so that the likeness of an individual could be
easily encoded and disseminated, for example, to law
enforcement agencies via wireless. Other enterprises
derived from this innovation included the creation of
supposedly defi nitive likenesses of historical fi gures
based upon a composite rendering of their representa-
tions on coins and medals, and a procedure for measur-
ing the distance between two points through a series of
photographs taken from distinct viewpoints.
For Galton, photography seemed to provide a reli-
able means for securing the scientifi c validity to which
his eugenic theories aspired, and was imagined to be
an objective medium through which the physiognomic
manifestation of human qualities could be envisioned
in pure pictorial fashion. His photographic experiments
proceeded from his fundamental misunderstanding of
the nature of this mode of representation, as well as
his deeply fl awed notions of heredity and evolution. It
was in the service of this suspect program that Galton’s
technologically inventive photographic experiments
were employed, and to which his ambivalent legacy
can be attributed.
Jordon BearBiography
Sir Francis Galton was born on February 16, 1822
in Sparkbrook, near Birmingham, England into the
comfortable household of Samuel Tertius Galton and
Violetta Darwin Galton. After schooling in medicine and
in mathematics, he embarked on a cartographic voyage
to Africa in 1850, returning to London to wed Louisa
Butler in 1853. Deeply infl uenced by the 1857 publica-
tion of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, he began a
series of studies in heredity and proposed a program of
breeding he called “eugenics,” which aimed to accelerate
the evolutionary process of sorting out what he deemed
to be the inferior characteristics of humanity. In an ef-
fort to determine and demonstrate the nature of these
unfavorable traits, Galton acquired in 1873 photographs
of prison inmates and employed an innovative process
of composite photography, in which several images
were superimposed onto a single photographic plate. A
great diversity of photographic pursuits based upon this
technique followed in the 1870s and 1880s. Upon his
death on January 17, 1911, the problematic program in
which Galton’s photographic ingenuity was employed
had begun to overshadow his technical achievement.Further Reading
Brookes, Martin, Extreme Measures: the Dark Visions and Bright
Ideas of Francis Galton, New York: Bloomsbury, 2004.
Bulmer, M.G., Francis Galton: Pioneer of Heredity and Biometry,
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
Forrest, D.W., Francis Galton: the Life and Work of a Victorian
Genius, London: Elek, 1974.
Galton, Francis, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Develop-
ment, London: Macmillan, 1883.
——, Memories of My Life, London: Methuen, 1908.
Gillham, Nicholas W., A Life of Sir Francis Galton: from African
Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics, Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 2001.
Gökyigit, Emel Aileen, “The Reception of Francis Galton’s He-
reditary Genius in the Victorian Periodical Press” in Journal
of the History of Biology 27(2), 1994, 215–240.
Green, David, “Veins of Resemblance: Photography and Eugen-
ics” in The Oxford Art Journal 7(2), 1985, 3–16.
Pearson, Karl. Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914–30.