![]() ![]() It is argued that Galton's composite photographs of the socially “fit” and “unfit” members of British society only broadly determined the pattern for how American and Australian eugenicists deployed photography, and that each country's differing social tensions caused them to evolve their own diverse set of photographic practices aimed at promulgating the eugenic cause. What was hidden in an individual's mind became shared.This essay traces the main ways in which photography was taken up and used by supporters of the eugenics movement, from the time that Darwin's cousin, the British polymath Francis Galton, first used it to demonstrate the role played by heredity in human intelligence, to the early 1940s, when the eugenics movement lost much of its appeal. Now they could be discussed in public, employed in teaching and propaganda, standardized, and mass-distributed. Unobservable and interior processes and representations were taken out of individual heads and put outside - as drawings, photographs and other visual forms. What before was a mental process, a uniquely individual state, now became part of a public sphere. The private and individual is translated into the public and becomes regulated. Hence the objectification of internal, private mental processes, and their equation with external visual forms which can be easily manipulated, mass produced, and standardized on its own. ![]() The subjects have to be standardized, and the means by which they are standardized need to be standardized as well. What to make of this desire to externalize the mind? In this essay, I will relate it to the demand of modern mass society for standardization. On the other hand, modern psychological theories of the mind, from Freud to cognitive psychology, also equate mental processes with external, technologically generated visual forms. On the one hand, we witness recurrent claims by the users of new visual technologies, from Galton to Jaron Lanier, that these technologies externalize and objectify the mind. ![]() This phenomenon can be called externalization of the mind. Galton's belief that his composite photographs gave abstract ideas material tangible form is just one example of a more general modern phenomenon. Plato's ideas were given concrete form: they could now be touched, copied, fabricated, multiplied, distributed, etc. With his photographs, Galton not only proposed that universals may be represented through generic images he actually objectified and materialized them. Galton not only claimed that "the ideal faces obtained by the method of composite portraiture appear to have a great deal in common with.so-called abstract ideas" but in fact he proposed to rename abstract ideas "cumulative ideas." In contrast to the human mind, "a most imperfect apparatus for the elaboration of general ideas," Galton championed his composite photographs, which, being mechanical and precise, were much more reliable for arriving at abstract representations. They are real generalizations, because they include the whole of the material under consideration." Galton wrote about his composite pictures that they are "much more than averages they are rather the equivalents of those large statistical tables whose totals, divided by the number of classes and entered on the bottom line, are the averages. ![]() Fabricated by a process of successive registration and exposure of portraits onto a single plate, Galton's composites were thought to constitute true statistic averages, representing human types - a criminal, a prostitute, an Englishman, a Jew, and others. In 1877 Sir Francis Galton, a statistician and a cousin of Charles Darwin, a founder of eugenics (a project of social betterment through planned breeding), and the author of highly influential psychological texts, pioneered a procedure of making composite photographs which proliferated widely in the next three decades. ![]()
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