The dark roots to her shock of white hair belie its artificiality–her roots even look to be the same shade as her cousin’s–and her carefully plucked tiny eyebrow in juxtaposition to the male side’s large and supposedly natural state displays an attention to appearance much more artificial than the man’s. The earring gives the sense of self-conscious adornment as does the slight eye make-up. The combination begs the comparison, and we might observe that while the man’s side looks rather natural in his raggedy scruff, the woman’s side is the quintessence of carefully pruned presentation. What I like most about this image is the potential to explore the different portrayals of gender as represented by these two individuals. This mash-up seems to emphasize difference more than similarity, but it also reveals a common lower face shape and a similar eye color. scruffy) clash to cobble together a very strange-looking entity. Their gender difference and starkly contrasting hairstyles (white vs. This is combination of two cousins of the same age, the male being the artist. Instead of overlaying images and letting common facial characteristics loom out while dissimilar ones fade into hazy incongruity, Collette matches two faces together in an effort to reveal common features between family members. Collette splices just two faces together belonging to the most intimately connected of human categories, the family. The result was a composite image, but of a different kind than Galton’s pictures with multiple facial sources, and of a more focused vision than Galton’s attempts to pictorially define race, criminality, infirmity, insanity, and nearly every other condition of mankind he decided he could categorize. Ulric Collette “accident” created what became a series of images when he was trying to teach himself photography and was trying to age his son in Photoshop. Galton sought to trace the hereditary links of certain groups of people, and both his objective and his composite images have been taken up by a contemporary photographer experimenting with Photoshop in Canada. For use information, consult Public Services at host institution for more information.Following Emily’s lead, I find that I too must return to the Sekula article after stumbling upon a project that irresistibly reminded me of Galton and his composite images. The Boston Medical Library does not hold copyright on all materials in this collection. Series: Boston Medical Library Subjects: Bowditch, H. Countway Library of Medicine) Collection (local): Boston Medical Libraryīoston Medical Library Rare Books Collection (2.Am.205) Location: Center for the History of Medicine (Francis A. Yet, as I have said, it is no such thing it is the portrait of a type, and not of an individual.” Two page spread about composite portraits from the publication of the second International Exhibition of EugenicsĬreator: Bowditch, H. Nobody who glanced at one of them for the first time, would doubt its being the likeness of a living person. These ideal faces have a surprising air of reality. Galton said, “The photographic process of which I there spoke, enables us 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 given group of men. While the composite photographs on display here as well as others in the collections of the Countway were created by physiologist Henry Pickering Bowditch, the development and original interpretation of the composite process with its eugenic implications was the work of Sir Francis Galton, who first published his research as “Composite portraits,” in Nature in 1878. An arrangement of composite portraits by Henry Pickering Bowditch (1840-1911) in the publication from the second International Exhibition of Eugenics in 1921.
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