Chapter 1

 

Photographic Portraiture in Scientific Representation

 

 

Scientific Representation and Photography

 

In the first half of the nineteenth century, we can observe the emergence of a novel regime of vision and visualisation. [1]   While, three centuries earlier, the development of typography had speeded up the process of detaching the content of knowledge from the knower, new observational techniques and the growing importance of visual illustration since the eighteenth century fostered a new notion of scientific truth and impartiality that hinged on the accuracy of visual perception. [2]   The theoretical foundation of this epistemological shift was laid by the emergent doctrines of positivism, a materialist and decidedly anti-metaphysical philosophy seeking a scientific description of nature and society that was solely based on facts. The main proponents of positivism, the social philosopher Auguste Comte (1798 - 1857) and the physiologist Claude Bernard (1813 - 1878), drew up an epistemological matrix which has since represented a dominant strand among modern conceptions of science and which can, for the present purpose, be treated as a coherent theory. [3]   Among its key principles are the verifiability of arguments, based on protocols of experiments and the explicit definition of methods, and the quantification of descriptive data. Thus, measuring becomes one of the primary tasks of the positivist scientist, and the statistical computation of measurements the main means of ascertaining truth. Scientists in all the human sciences subscribed to the new statistical paradigm which promised a firmer grip on what were seen as natural and social unpredictabilities, and which allowed for the setting of fixed standards for norm and deviation. [4]  

            Positivism claimed a status of objectivity for its results that set it apart from the sphere of the phenomena themselves, to a level where it was identical with the laws of processes. Its aim was to provide the knowledge about the sociological conditions of existence (Comte) or the determinants of physiological processes (Bernard) which would allow scientifically sound practical intervention in terms of social policies or medical techniques. Positivism heralded a strongly visual approach and suggested that scientific truths could be uncovered by seeing rather than by reading the world. Photography, it was believed, provided a mechanical means of visually assessing reality that could match the desire for objectivity.

            In a recent study into the history of scientific objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have examined nineteenth-century scientific atlases in order to describe a new trend towards what they call a “moralisation of objectivity”. [5]   Together with the work of Jonathan Crary, their study provides important clues for the historical context of the present study.

            The desire to “Let nature speak for itself”, that catch-phrase of the positivist conception of scientific representation, led nineteenth-century scientists to adopt a notion of “mechanical objectivity” which sought to eliminate all suspect human mediation from the scientific process. This entailed a conscious exercise of self-restraint on the part of the scientist and the attempt at excluding the interference of his subjectivity. The claim for photography’s truthfulness was based not on its representational precision, but on the automation of the process and the assumed exclusion of the scientist’s will or judgement. Despite the limited importance of photography for the start or the outcome of the debate about objectivity, the photographic image represented a significant ideological force in it, symbolising a strong faith in the superiority of mechanical objectivity. Any human agent involved in the reproduction of scientific representations was seen as a potential liability, which is why all sorts of control mechanisms had to be devised to monitor the reproduction process. [6]

            A crucial factor in the development of the new notion of scientific objectivity that Daston and Galison point out is the deferral of authority and responsibility to the audience, i.e. in their case, to the readers of the atlases. This is a movement we can also trace in some of the human-scientific discourses on photography. The “essential role of the readers’ response” [7] , however, remains a complement rather than a substitute to the authorial role of the scientist in ascertaining scientific truthfulness. Daston and Galison conclude that the new photomechanical techniques altered rather than eliminated suspected sources of subjectivity.

            In 1878, the French astronomer Jules Janssen (1824 - 1907) claimed that the photographic plate was the new “retina of the scholar” and indicated that the mechanical replacement of the observing eye could help to show what could not be seen by the human eye. With Duchenne de Boulogne’s experiments of the 1850s, to which we will return presently, photography ceased to be a mere illustrative, complementing device, and became a research tool and instrument of discovery that formed an integral part of scientific experimentation. [8] As a consequence, the entire visual field of science was extended to include what had hitherto been invisible. Sylvie Merzeau has recently argued that positivism gave birth to a “phantasm of absolute visibility” and unleashed a “scopic pulsion” in the course of which photography was used to push the limits of visibility and to explore the invisible. [9]   This was made possible by photography’s ability to record instances which evaded human observation because of their complexity, their slow or fleeting nature, and their distance or their size, and by the modes of photogenic abstraction of physical processes.

            One might expect that, as writing and images became increasingly important for the documentation and proliferation of knowledge, the cognitive function of memory would become less important. Yet, even for photographic images, it was necessary to devise a semiotic for decoding them, and a set of receptive practices in order to operationalise their contents. As the earlier discussion of the notion of faciality has already suggested, it is on this level of semiosis and reception that the problem of the subjective crept back into the ‘mechanical objectivity’ of photography, and formed one of the major concerns of its commentators. [10]

            In his study of the new conceptions of vision and the new type of observing subject that developed between 1820 and 1840, Jonathan Crary highlights the crucial role of material and practical “techniques for the management of attention” [11]   for the related, newly emerging modes of subjectification. Putting a strong focus on the observer as the pivot of an understanding of scientific photography, Crary claims that the nineteenth-century notion of vision is inextricably linked with an observing subject who “is both the historical product and the site of certain practices, techniques, institutions, and procedures of subjectification.” [12]   This terrain constituted by intersecting lines of visibility and enunciation, of forces and subjectification, this dispositif proper, [13]   pertains to a complex economic structure:

 

To understand the “photography effect” in the nineteenth century, one must see it as a crucial component of a new cultural economy of value and exchange, not as part of a continuous history of visual representation. [14]

 

Photographs circulate in this economy both as material commodities and as symbolic currencies. For an understanding of the ‘visual economy of individuals’ it is important to see that, as Crary puts it,

 

the nineteenth-century optical devices […] involved arrangements of bodies in space, regulations of activity, and the deployment of individual bodies, which codified and normalized the observers within rigidly defined systems of visual consumption. [15]

 

These formations of subjectification were based on a repositioning of the observer in relation to the visual field, and on the blurring of the dichotomy of interior and exterior that structured it. [16]  

            A word of caution, though. Crary, like many other authors who have covered the topics that will come under investigation here, including Carlo Ginzburg, Christian Phéline, and Renzo Villa, rehearses the notions of social control and repression to explain the objectives of such modern visual orders. A “repression hypothesis”, however, is unable to account for the productive aspects of the semiotic regimes within which photography comes to operate and from which the modern individual emerges in the first place. The hypothesis that, in so far as the recognising memory is a subjectifying cognitive function, the scientific observers are the subjects proper of scientific photography who do not preexist the process of subjectification, will be corroborated in the following discussions of the role that portrait photography played in the realisation of such modes of subjectification within human scientific discourses.

 

 

Sociological Theories of the Normal Individual

 

In his study of twentieth-century technologies of subjectification, Nikolas Rose reviews their genealogy in a political-theoretical perspective:

 

When the nineteenth century constitutional doctrines of liberty, rights, and the rule of law proclaimed limits upon the use of state power to intervene into the lives of citizens, they presupposed an individual endowed with personal responsibilities for the social consequences of their acts and propensities for the self-regulation of conduct. The mass of detailed prescriptions and proscriptions characteristic of the police was to be dismantled. But the other face of such doctrines was the construction of a web of technologies for fabricating and maintaining those very forms of social subjectivity and self-government upon which the exercise of political power was premised. [17]

 

The hypothesis rehearsed here is that portrait photography constituted one of these subjectifying technologies, and that the use of photographic portraits by human scientists, as well as by individuals in private and semi-private contexts, served to bolster contemporary notions of individualism. Rose continues:

 

At stake was more than the simple imposition of a moral code under the threat of punishment, more than blind obedience to an arbitrary set of doctrines. The existence of a space of regulated freedom depended on the generalization of a set of ethical techniques for the self-inspection and self-evaluation in relation to the code, a way of making the feelings, wishes, and emotions of the self visible to itself, a way in which citizens were to problematize and govern their lives and conduct, to find a way in which, as free subjects, they could live a good life as the consequence of their own character. [18]

 

We will see later that the self-techniques described here included the examination of photographs in a variety of ways.

            These passages also point to the dialectical conception of the ‘normal’ individual that was dominant in sociological theories of the nineteenth century. The individual was free to make choices, but the structure within which those choices could be made was regulated and predetermined by the social formation. The following section will briefly present some of the most influential of these theories - notably those of Herbert Spencer, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Emile Durkheim -, and will try to point out some of the regularities of the discourse about the individual in the period. [19]   At the time when some human scientists defined the ‘norms’ against which social deviance was measured, there was a modern and anti-humanist discourse about the notion of the individual which points us to the fragility of the individualist myth during the period.

            Similarly to their contemporary Karl Marx (1818 - 1883), Spencer, Tönnies and Durkheim saw modern society as one stage in an historical development, and construed the modern individual as a function of that historical stage. What unites the three theorists is the attempt to overcome the achieved antagonistic understanding of the relation between individual and society towards one which sees them in a complementary relationship.

            Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903), who in 1859 claimed that sociology ought to become the “natural history of society”, subscribed to a conception which explained the historical dynamic of society as based on biological and evolutionary mechanisms. The dialectic of the individual is, as David Wiltshire comments, spelled out precisely:

 

The individual […] has two dimensions in Spencerian theory; he is a ‘monad’ of the organic society, which outlives him and to whose subsistence his life is a subordinate consideration; yet counterpoised to this bleakly homuncular figure is the individual whose maximal freedom and self-determination is the goal of this progress, and whose interests are considered before those of society. [20]

 

Like an organism, society will work best when its members function in perfect harmony. Spencer claims that the “perfect man” will be capable of

 

effecting complete adjustment of acts to ends of every kind. […] Complete life in a complete society is but another name for complete equilibrium between the co-ordinated activities of each social unit and those of the aggregate of units. [21]

 

For a successful functioning of modern social mechanisms it is vital that the individual will conceive of itself as a free and autonomous being who will take its decisions on the basis of ethical convictions:

 

The citizen has to regard himself at once subjectively and objectively - subjectively as possessing sympathetic sentiments (which are themselves the product of evolution), objectively as one among many social units having like sentiments by the combined operation of which certain social effects are produced. [22]

 

From a theoretical point of view, however, the individual is fully subjected to the forces that move society: in the process of evolution, even those “great men who seem prime movers are merely the tools with which it works. [23]

            Spencer’s influence rested largely on the fact that he was instrumental in making the theory of evolution known to practitioners across the social and human sciences of the period. Many, including Tönnies and Durkheim, soon came to reject his staunchly biologistic conception of society, while positively crediting Spencer for his general contribution to sociology. [24]   The English psychiatrist Henry Maudsley (1835 - 1918), for instance, adapted Spencer’s evolutionary model to his own notion of ‘mental evolution’, “consisting in the progressive supersession of states of ‘subjective’ (or self-) consciousness by states of ‘objective consciousness’.” [25]   The self-conscious individual endowed with a free will would, according to this model, be but a passing stage on the road to evolutionary perfection.

 

There would be no passion then in the sense of suffering because there would be a perfect equilibrium between feeling and doing; an aggregate of perfect reflexes might function so exactly and completely on every occasion that consciousness would be swallowed up in the […] achievement of ideal perfection. [Such a man] would act perfectly from instinct without need of reason, his divinings being discoveries, his aspirations prophesies, his performances instincts: he might get a long way back towards the Paradise in which his first ancestor was before, eating the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, he obtained the fatal gift of consciousness. [26]

 

            With less utopian fervour, yet, in a similar theoretical vein, the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies (1855 - 1936) wrote his widely received and acclaimed book of 1887 on the principle formations of traditional and modern societies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. The programmatic title summarised the historical shift that Tönnies sought to describe from communitarian to societal forms of organisation. They correlate with two types of will motivating the action of the individual, Wesenwille and Kürwille, the former essential and natural, the other accidental and rational. [27]   Like Spencer, Tönnies posits that the forces which determine social evolution lie outside the individual. The subject is the medium rather than the agent of social processes, and only through the agency of consciousness does it acquire a subjective understanding of being identical with those exterior ‘acts’. [28]   This identification notwithstanding, the unity of the subject remains “nominal, ideal, fictitious”: it is a subject of rational will, a mechanical unit defined by exterior parameters. Its unity is a construction of scientific thought which merges a complex multiplicity of forces, power and tools into an ideal singularity. [29]  

            Persons do, however, exist as individuals with a self-relation, i.e. who recognise themselves as such and who play a role or take up the character of a person “as though holding a mask in front of their face”. [30]   The unity of the subject is thus, to an important degree, constituted through the faculties of mimesis and memory. In Tönnies’ conception, memory belongs to the side of the natural will, yet it goes beyond the organic sensual pleasure and animal habit also located there, and is wedded to reason. Human nature, Man’s unity, and the content of the self, are what we are capable of and what we have wanted as results of pleasure, habit, and memory, respectively. [31]

            We find variations of this conceptualisation of the constituted, self-reflexive modern individual across the nineteenth-century sciences. Physiological research was pivotal in promoting the model. The Viennese brain physiologist, Theodor Meynert (1833 - 1892), explained the formation of individuality and the Ego as a physiological learning process. A “primary Ego” is first constituted on the body, as

 

the phenomena arising from the own body soon supersede all discontinuous exterior phenomena through their affirmation to the consciousness by a constant presence, and through their intensity caused by repetition. [32]

 

The “secondary Ego” follows on from the first. Its contents are made up of

 

the exterior perceptions repeated most frequently, as well as the mnemonic images reproduced most often and most strongly charged with emotions, which also form very strong, unified images. […] The content of secondary individuality, however, lies outside the boundaries of the body. […] Individuality thus becomes a function which includes much of the outside world. [33]

 

Meynert’s description is complementary to the notion of a composite individual formulated by Tönnies, and projects an understanding of freedom which is closely related to that conceived by Spencer: “The Ego is an incalculable act of coordinating the perceptions, thoughts, [and] emotional impulses generated by the brain, whose incalculability is articulated by the phenomenon of freedom.” [34]

            Finally, the sociological theory of Emile Durkheim (1858 - 1917) is also premised on the assumption of the primacy of society over the individual. The individual, and its subjectivity as an awareness of itself as an individual, are born of the historical development of society. What is realised in the form of personal motivations is really a result of the internalisation of social norms. In his Cours de science sociale of 1888, Durkheim writes that it is the task of sociology to show that the individual is a mere organ of a solidary whole. Accordingly, the understanding that an individual should have of its personal development should be directed towards its social function: “Equip yourself to fulfil usefully a specific function.” [35]   This attitude is the precise, active and self-conscious complement to the ideal Spencerian situation described by Henry Maudsley in which the individual functions in perfect unison with the social organism.

            Personal self-conceptions were both violently opposed to such de-individualised notions, and yet conformed precisely to their descriptions. [36]   The tripartite complex of normalisation, visualisation and subjectification had as one of its stabilising side-effects the installation of the firm belief in individual difference and uniqueness. The serialised and standardised representation of such modern individuals in portrait photographs was one of the mechanisms that fostered this belief while, at the same time, undermining it radically. It shared this trait with painted portraiture which, from its onset, had articulated the interlacing of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ on the individual body.

            An extreme example of the visualisation of such conceptions are Francis Galton’s composite portraits which articulated the translation of the sociologically conceived modern individual into a visual image more radically than did regular portraiture. The composite photograph represented a social-cum-visual average, and showed the degree to which the included individuals conformed to or deviated from it. For Galton, the procedure was a visual test for the homogeneity of social groups. Although these images represented types rather than individuals, individual traits could not be eliminated fully, unless large samples of images were chosen. “If the number of combined portraits had been large, these ghostly accessories would have become too faint to be visible.” [37]   The ghosts of singularity vanish in the socius.

 

 

Eugenics and Composite Identities: Francis Galton

 

Like biology, philology and political economy, the human sciences - including psychiatry, physical anthropology, ethnography, and criminal anthropology - are modern disciplines which developed in the course of the nineteenth century. Michel Foucault has claimed that the being that they are centrally concerned with, knowable Man, first emerged at the end of the eighteenth century. [38]   The human sciences served to define and isolate the living, speaking and working human being, seeking explanatory models for its behaviour, for its specific and diverse forms of existence, and for what were regarded as deviations from the normal individual.

            Throughout the century, such models were permanently contested. An exemplary case for this contestation was the debate between polygenists and monogenists, the latter claiming a single originary source for the human species, while the former held that various human species had sprung up in different places of the world. [39]   The ramifications of this question extended far beyond the academic problems of classification and periodisation: the polygenist argument lent itself more easily to claims for the existence of essential racial differences between African, Asian or European peoples, and to warnings against their intermingling. Similarly, the debate among criminologists about criminality as an inborn fact or a social effect, had far-reaching and sometimes fatal consequences where it entered the domain of social politics.

            The work of Francis Galton (1822 - 1911) can point not only to the main areas of human scientific inquiries in the second half of the nineteenth century, but also to the social and political currents that such work could generate. Furthermore, it provides an opportunity to introduce some themes concerning scientific photography which will be explored more fully in the following chapters. While the range of Galton’s interests was quite extreme, his opinions were never exceptional in the respective contexts in which he chose to engage. [40]  

            After studying medicine and mathematics, and having travelled in Asia and Africa, Galton trained as a geographer and meteorologist. All of these diverse interests were brought to bear in his subsequent investigations into anthropology, biology, and psychology. Of central concern to Galton was the question of human heredity, i.e. in which ways certain characteristics were passed on from one generation to the next. In an early publication, Hereditary Genius (1869), he presented the results of research he had done on family records mainly of the English social elites which, as Galton claimed, showed that intelligence and creativity were due to inheritance (“nature”), rather than to social circumstance (“nurture”). [41]

            The importance of these findings extended far beyond an explanation of the phenomenon of multiple cases of genius in a family’s consecutive generations. Galton strove to understand the family as the nucleus of a nation’s biological potential, as the literal breeding ground for a healthy race. These arguments were complemented by research on “the criminal classes” as examples of the bad biological material that was threatening the race, and on soldiers as examples of biological superiority that pointed the evolutionary way forward. As a consequence, Galton claimed that, in order to achieve effective racial improvement, it was necessary to devise policies that would regulate the breeding behaviour of the different social classes. His social and political reform proposals were summarised under the title “Eugenics” and were soon to develop into an international movement. [42]   Eugenicism represented a scientific and utopian vision of anthropology which construed the social strata as biological entities. Individuals were not only members of different classes, but of separate races. The practical “cultivation of race” as envisaged by the eugenicists included the promotion of “early marriages in the classes to be favoured”, and educational policies guided by the “probability of future performance based on the past performance of the ancestors of the child.” The possibility of enforcing celibacy among ‘undesirables’ was also hinted at, yet deemed to be more difficult to put into effect. [43]

            Looking for ways of enhancing the scientific profile of his convictions, Galton “sought to visualize the generic evidence of hereditarian laws.” [44]   From 1877 onwards, he started to work on a system of composite photography which provided mixed portraits through the superimposition of images of multiple individuals onto the same photographic plate [ill.1]. The result was a slightly blurred and ‘flat’ image which, in Galton’s words,

 

represents no man in particular, but portrays an imaginary figure, possessing the average features of any given group of men. These ideal faces have a surprising air of reality. Nobody who glances at one of them for the first time, would doubt its being the likeness of a living person. Yet, as I have said, it is no such thing; it is the portrait of a type and not of an individual. [45]

 

This procedure, which Galton also referred to as a kind of “pictorial statistics”, assumed the possibility of quantifying optical data and visually computing them according to numerical principles of statistics. The positivist optimism towards observed ‘facts’ was extended into the domain of the visual.

            Photography seemed to offer Galton a unique means of identifying and representing the racial types which formed a key factor in eugenicist arguments:

 

It is the essential notion of a race that there should be some ideal typical form from which the individuals may deviate in all directions, but about which they chiefly cluster, and towards which their descendants will continue to cluster. The easiest direction in which a race can be improved is towards that central type, because nothing new has to be sought out. It is only necessary to encourage as far as practicable the breed of those who conform most nearly to the central type, and to restrain as far as may be the breed of those who deviate widely from it. Now there can hardly be a more appropriate method of discovering the central physiognomical type of any race or group than that of composite portraiture. [46]

 

            The problem with this “purely optical apparition” of types, [47]   however, was the rationalisation in the scientific arguments of the evidence they provided. In his recent study of Galton’s composite portraits, Gunnar Schmidt has pointed out how seldom Galton actually verbalised the content of the portraits. [48]   They remained pure icons of the preconceptions which they were supposed to complement and confirm. Galton invented a purely visual discourse which, as we shall see in a moment, was disrupted rather than articulated by the observing subject.

            Prior to the production of the composite image, Galton made further pre-selections from the already qualified samples of families, soldiers, or criminals [ill.2].

 

No statistician dreams of combining objects into the same generic group that do not cluster towards a common centre; no more should we attempt to compose generic portraits out of heterogeneous elements, for if we do so the result is monstrous and meaningless. [49]

 

This attempt at a justification only strengthens the suspicion that, if anything, these images functioned as a tautological confirmation of the “ideological biologization of existing class relations in England” [50]   envisioned by Galton. The deployment of the photographic technique which is supposed to articulate an invisible imagined ideal, “camouflages the structure of prejudice with its claim to authenticity, granting a certificate of truthfulness.” [51]

            It is interesting to note that Galton consciously qualified the accuracy of photography as a medium of scientific representation. Displacing the centrality of observation, photography replaces human cognition by a technical device:

 

A composite portrait represents the picture that would rise before the mind’s eye of a man who had the gift of pictorial imagination in an exalted degree. But the imaginative power even of the highest artists is far from precise, and it is so apt to be biased by special cases that may have struck their fancies, that no two artists agree in any of their typical forms. The merit of the photographic composite is its mechanical precision, being subject to no errors beyond those incidental to all photographic productions. [52]

 

As we will see again and again, this awareness of the “errors incidental to all photographic productions”, which always lurks beside the affirmation of “mechanical precision”, was widespread and gives the lie to the myth of an uncritical nineteenth-century belief in photography’s truthfulness. [53]

            Another practical device with which Galton sought to promote his programme was the life history album which he first proposed in a publication from 1884. The album was to combine a genealogical with a biographical representation of an individual, providing it with a detailed biological record of its life and, more importantly, securing a unique source for anthropological research as pursued by Galton. The published album had ready prepared charts for noting down measurements of body weight and stature, fingerprints, and further physical descriptions, all to be recorded in five-year intervals. Additionally, photographs formed an integral part of this biological autobiography. Special pages were left blank for them, and in the binding of the album the inclusion of thick photographic cards had been taken into consideration.

            Photographs of children under five “will probably be of more interest as mementos of early childhood than of solid use. Still, on both accounts, some few of them should be preserved.” [54]   More significant were the portraits taken during youth and adulthood. In their design, the aesthetic and psychological wishes were likely to collide with the requirements of scientific usefulness.

 

The ideal portraiture for anthropological purposes is an exact full face and an exact profile, each one-seventh of the size of nature. But the result is far from picturesque, and the souls of artistic photographers revolt from taking them. These accurate but unseemly portraits are, like the finger-prints, made in prisons. [55]

 

Galton seemed to be struggling with the social stigma that anthropological research had acquired through laying much emphasis on what was seen as social and biological deviance. A fully surveyed society ready for strategies of racial improvement, however, was paramount to Galton’s project. He therefore appealed to a new, eugenicist sense of aesthetic and suggested that families should, beside recording their biological development in the life history album, have composite photographs made for decorating the walls of their homes [ill.3]. “The result is sure to be artistic in expression and flatteringly handsome, and would be very interesting to the members of the family. Young and old, and persons of both sexes can be combined into one ideal face. I can well imagine a fashion setting in to have these pictures.” [56]

            Galton admitted, however, that this fashion would not be easy to engineer.

 

I have made several other family portraits, which to my eyes 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. 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. [57]

 

This observation points us to one of the key questions which we will have to address throughout the study, i.e. that of the subject as viewer. The recognition of the self in a portrait photograph was frequently highlighted by nineteenth-century writers as a crucially problematic and productive instance.

            Similarly, we find indications for the basic importance of the scientist’s sentiments during the photo-analytic activity. Galton once described how he had to sort thousands of portraits of medical patients, and he comments that, despite the frequent malformations, “in studying their portraits the pathetic interest prevailed, and I returned day after day to my tedious work of classification, with a liking for my materials.” As regards the portraits of criminals, he continued, the experience was quite otherwise: “The sense of [the degradation of their expressions] took firm hold of me, and I cannot now handle the portraits without overcoming by an effort the aversion they suggest.” [58]   The epistemic force of photography seems to have been dependent on the emotive cognitive process which images triggered in the observer. Galton believed that the composite portraits would not only help to evade the pitfalls of human perception and cognition, but that they might themselves, as analoguous representations of cognitive processes, help to investigate and understand those, yet unexplained, processes:

 

My argument is, that the generic images that arise before the mind’s eye, and the general impressions which are faint and faulty editions of them, are the analogues of these composite pictures which we have the advantage of examining at leisure, and whose peculiarities and character we can investigate, and from which we may draw conclusions that shall throw much light on the nature of certain mental processes which are too mobile and evanescent to be directly dealt with. [59]

 

Galton hints at a number of issues which we will find addressed recurrently in nineteenth-century discourses on photography, including the chronological dimension of visual perception, the notion of an artificially, yet fruitfully arrested vision, and the close relationship between photographic images and the cognitive image-processing function of memory. [60]   It will become clearer in the course of the study to which degree notions of photographic objectivity rested on these parameters of subjective experience. First, however, we should take a closer look at the historical background and the theoretical and disciplinary environment of the nineteenth-century human sciences.

 

 

Anthropology

 

In Britain, the study of Man which had emerged across Europe in a positivist, materialist format around the middle of the century, was often studied by gentleman-amateurs like Galton. Although there was no overall cohesion between the different schools and disciplines which come under the roof of the European human sciences, it is safe to say that, for the second half of the nineteenth century, their foundations were laid, enhanced or merged by the French anthropologist Paul Broca (1824 - 1880), and by his student Paul Topinard (1830 - 1911) who published several major works which presented Broca’s research to a wider public. Broca conceived anthropology as a “natural history of Man” and thus provided the model for a human-scientific interdiscipline. The French Idéologues around Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis (1757 - 1808) had, at the end of the eighteenth century, sought to elevate medicine as the most salient of sciences dealing with Man, an anthropologie to which the other disciplines were mere accessories. [61]   Psychiatry and criminal anthropology emerged from the same field of medico-anthropological thinking. Soon, however, the medical paradigm was to be challenged by efforts to provide anthropology with a biological foundation, a shift that was marked by the establishment of a chair for anthropology at the Musée d’histoire naturelle for Broca’s mentor Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefage (1810 - 1892) in 1855. [62]

            The two main themes of Broca’s anthropology were the problem of understanding the origin of Man, and the description and classification of human races. From the first theme sprang the discussions about monogeny and polygeny, and about the impact of evolution on the development of humans, while the second triggered debates about the interfertility of races, about hybridisation, and about the historicity of differences between humans. The conflation of arguments about racial hierarchies, and about the superiority of European civilisation over all other cultures, served the introduction of a racio-cultural paradigm which permeated major parts of nineteenth-century anthropological discourses. In them, there were two core strands of research, of which one developed from an older ethnological tradition and focused on philologico-linguistic and historico-geographical questions, while the other was resolutely physico-biological in its orientation. [63]   In both cases, however, the racio-cultural paradigm had the dual task of ‘internally’ fostering a sense of national homogeneity, and of ‘externally’ affirming racial difference and racio-political superiority.

            The main phase of institutional establishment between 1860 and 1870 is indicated by the founding of the different anthropological societies in France, Germany, Italy and Britain in that period. [64]   Despite disagreements about the emphases put on biological or cultural facts between different factions, Paul Broca was internationally acknowledged as a key figure in the founding of the discipline around which the other human sciences would cluster and which addressed itself to all those who, in the words of the Italian anthropologist Paolo Mantegazza (1831 - 1910), were “curious and avid to know who and what Man really is, bare in the face of nature.” [65]   The gradual establishment of the Institut d’Anthropolgie under Broca’s directorship provided him and his followers with a unique research centre encompassing a laboratory (1868), a periodical in the form of the Revue d’Anthropologie (1872 ff), and a school (1876), all located under the roof of the Ecole de Médecine.

            Writing in the preface to Topinard’s Anthropologie (1876), Broca described the new interdiscipline as enlarging

 

the programme of ethnology, by grouping around the study of the human races the medical sciences, comparative anatomy, and zoology, prehistoric archaeology, palaeontology, linguistics, and history. [66]

 

As racial characteristics and differences initially played such a crucial role, the hereditarian aspects of racial development were at the heart of anthropological debates. They had to provide explanations not only for the assumed racial superiority of the ‘white European race’, but also for problems of abnormality, of social deviance and physical difference within European societies. The concept of degeneration was used to describe what was seen as the threat of a reversal in evolutionary progress, while atavism referred to the resurfacing of features from earlier stages in human evolution. Both formed part of the analytical arsenal of biologistic attempts at social refom which, like Galton’s eugenicist movement, sought to solve social problems through bio-political measures. [67]

            The prime target of anthropological analysis was the human body, which was studied anatomically and physiologically. In the first half of the nineteenth century, phrenology had served to foster a strong interest in the human skull as an outstanding indicator of human faculties and characteristics. Broca therefore suggested anthropometry and craniometry as the key methods of anthropology: for a while, measuring and the statistical computation of the derived data became the prime strategies for the anthropological description and understanding of Man. [68]  

            George W. Stocking has summarised the four central preoccupations of physical anthropology:

 

[1.]the assumption that the cultural differences of men were the direct product of differences in their racial physical stature; [2.] the idea that the distinguishing physical differences between the human races were virtually primordial; [3.] the idea that the most important of these differences were those involving the human skull and brain; and [4.] the assumption that out of the heterogeneity of modern populations there could be constructed “types” which were representative of the “pure races” from whose mixture these modern populations derived. [69]

 

Over the following decades, this essentialist concept of race came under increasing pressure and was later to be redefined as a mere theoretical construct by Topinard himself. [70]

            Addressing anthropology as a human scientific interdiscipline in a European (rather than national) context, begs some explanation. The growing importance of the European dimension in nineteenth-century scientific debates was facilitated by a growing number of international congresses in every field, and by the translations of major works which often appeared instantly. Jean-Martin Charcot’s neurological lectures were first published in France in 1872, the German translation appeared in 1874, followed by the English version in 1881. Cesare Lombroso’s L’Uomo delinquente had first been published in Italy in 1876, and after an enlarged edition came out which Lombroso presented at the first International Congress of Criminal Anthropology in Rome in 1885, German and French translations were out within only two years, the latter going into its third edition in 1895. In the case of Paul Topinard’s L’Anthropologie of 1876, there was a formal link between the Parisian publisher Reinwald and the London-based Chapman & Hall, who jointly published a multi-volume Library of Contemporary Science of which Topinard’s book formed part. The personal libraries of leading European anthropologists testify to the general availability of these publications. [71]

            The socio-historical conditions of these debates, however, often differed considerably from one country to the next. The impact of the revolutions in France, the search for ethnic and cultural identities following the political unifications of Italy and Germany, the early industrial revolution in England which led to a crisis of the modern city earlier than in the neighboring countries - all these were factors which changed the respective frames of reference as well as the structure of problems that scientists might want to tackle. Disparate epistemological traditions and institutional structures further added to the heterogeneity of the situation.

            The current study seeks to use this heterogeneity in a productive way for its cross-European overview over the different human scientific disciplines with regard to their use of photography. In many cases, the differences between national schools are not more significant than those within a certain national context, so that, for instance, the internal German criminological debate mirrored the antagonism between the Italian school around Lombroso, and the French school around Lacassagne. Other differences in certain disciplines resulted from a differentiation not so much along national lines, but according to the types of institutional organisation. Psychiatry, for example, changed its face in most countries as it altered its status from providing care for the insane to an academic medical discipline. The split that persisted between physical anthropology and ethnography was an obstacle to a union of the respective learned societies only in France, where the Société d’Anthropologie and the Société d’Ethnographie remained separate, while the parallel institutions in Germany, Italy and Britain were united around 1870. If this particularity is significant on an institutional level, it does not mean that the theoretical cleavage underlying it did not stay in place outside France. [72]

            In the case of anthropology proper, we can see how the discipline developed its ideological function in the search for homogenous racial groups to coincide with nations right across Europe, whether that search was more inwardlooking, as in the cases of the newly unified German and Italian societies, or whether it was motivated by English cultural and political elites seeking scientific affirmation of their racial superiority, externally against colonised peoples, as well as internally against the lower classes and against the colonial population on the doorstep, especially the Irish.

            Despite differences in the social and political situations, the European human sciences seem to have developed on a continuous rather than discontinuous epistemic plane. Sandra Puccini, writing about the semi-independent and parallel evolution of Italian anthropology, points to this epistemic cohesion:

 

The birth of Italian anthropology resulted not only from the influence of foreign models, but also from the presence of a secular and scientistic current in Italian thought and from numerous and fruitful rapports with the Europe of empiricism and sensualism. The principal tenents of that current of thought had sustained the advancement of a positive and anti-metaphysical science of Man from the very beginning of the nineteenth century. [73]

 

            Equally, the methodological approaches were partly dependent on peculiarities of the national contexts, and partly on circumstance and the personal preoccupations of scientists and amateurs who got involved in anthropological research. The predominant use in Italy of cultural and mental facts to support the ethnic and racial characterisation of a group can be related to the importance of folklore in the establishment of a national cultural identity, while the German emphasis on medical and archaeological research had more to do with the composition of the anthropological society. As in Britain, German anthropologists were recruited from a host of disciplines, having trained as medics, biologists, geographers, philosophers, or lawyers. In France, the close link between Broca’s anthropological school and the Ecole de Médecine resulted in a strong medical bias, and a relative scarcity of historical, juridical or religious considerations. The French pursuit of anthropology as a pure science was, furthermore, connected to its institutional status on the fringe of academic circles, while British anthropological research was to a large degree in the hands of colonial administrators and missionaries, effecting an often more pragmatic and ‘sociological’ approach. [74]

            Throughout the discipline we find that the pursuit of anthropology was tightly linked to linguistic and mathematical models, and that therefore, beyond the textual, the regime of representation of anthropology was dominated by graphs and statistical tables rather than by images. The application of photography was scarce, unsystematic and idiosyncratic, and it is not possible to distill specific national or disciplinary regimes of photographic signification from the currently given sources. Despite contemporary attempts at bolstering positivist claims to scientific objectivity by using photography, the medium failed to be fully integrated into anthropological disciplinary strategies. For the present study, however, the heterogeneity of the historical field under investigation helps to highlight the main theoretical problems that accounted for photography’s relative marginality to it.

            Without detailed recourse to aspects of visuality, Broca and Topinard’s anthropology articulates the assumed inseparability of social and cultural phenomena from physical facts. It represents an epistemological stage through which branches of many medical, social, and ethnological disciplines passed. For some decades after mid-century, the biological paradigm represented the strongest current in the human sciences and can therefore be used as a measuring post for assessing the respective positions of scientists in that period. The slow demise of a purely anatomical anthropology coincided, as Nélia Dias has pointed out, with the emergence of criminal anthropology, of psychiatry, and of social anthropology. These three disciplines provide the cases for the discussion of photographic applications that will follow in the first part of this study. [75]

            The shift from a concept of anthropology as a pure science to one that sought practical applications in the social arena can be observed across the human sciences, whether in demands for ethnography’s partisanship to colonial governments, or in criminology’s attempts at influencing legal and penal practices. In Topinard’s own work, the shift is evident if we look at his two major publications from 1876 and from 1900: while in the former he presented anthropology as a science pure, the latter promoted anthropologie comme sociotechnie. [76] Anthropology was thus redefined from being a branch of natural history, to a sociological discipline. It is interesting in the context of the present study that Topinard marks this shift by the introduction, in the publication of 1900, of a new explanatory model for the difference between animals and humans. In his earlier works, this distinction had been made on the basis of zoological classifications. Now Topinard uses the notions of individuality, the ego and the self and ascribes to humans the unique ability to make socially motivated decisions. In his discussions of the socio-anthropological significance of categories like solidarity, equality and justice he is strongly influenced by the French sociological school of Auguste Comte and the younger generation around Emile Durkheim, having replaced a biologistic paradigm with a sociological positivism in which the socially defined individual steps into the spotlight of human scientific attention.

 

 

Historical and Practical Aspects of Scientific Photography - Albert Londe

 

An important element in the positivist project was the extension of the scientific field of vision and the ‘factualising’ fixation of visual phenomena. [77]   From the moment when it first received public attention in 1839, photography suggested itself as a likely means of positivist scientific representation. Its main areas of usage were in place at the end of the 1850s. [78]   They included microscopic photography for biological, medical and geological purposes, telescopic images taken for astronomical studies, geographical applications of aerial photography, and the production of panoramic cards for military purposes. Zoology and anthropology were also among these ‘photogenic’ fields of scientific investigation, although the difficulties in computing their visual phenomena put them into second rank. The Parisian photographic entrepreneurs Mayer and Pierson suggested the comparative study of photographs as a prime analytic method, based on, it seems, an almost ‘blind’ fascination for photography’s potential as a means of research.

 

On walking through the anthropological galleries of the museum, a single look suffices to understand the service photography can render to the study of the human races. The plaster casts one finds there reproduce the shapes quite precisely, but they lack that which characterises Man in general, i.e. physiognomy. In the portraits, beneath those more or less bestial faces, there is always a ray of intelligence; whereas in the plasters, nothing but inert types without life or soul. It would not be one of the lesser services rendered to civilisation by photography if it one day permitted science to assemble enough authentic types to study the human races in their entirety. [79]

 

Photography, we should note, is not praised for its accuracy, but for adding life and soul to the representation, and the facilitation of comparative anthropological analyses. The stress lies not on a epistemological leap based on photography’s ontological status, but on an emotional force generated during the reception, and on the provision of study material.

            The medical applications included physiological analyses of the development and movements of the body. [80]   Like the methods of photogenic recording of measurements developed in meteorology, geology, physics and in other contexts, these physiological representations abstracted from the surface appearance of their objects, and focused instead on a visualisation of non-visual aspects, such as temperature changes, morphological movements of the earth, or the structural configuration of limbs in motion [ill.4].

            The main incentive for employing photography as an observational device was its promise to be a corrective for the imperfections of human perception. In 1864, the French astonomer, Hervé-Auguste Faye (1814 - 1902), remarked at a meeting of the Académie des sciences:

 

I have frequently pointed out to the Academy individual mistakes which resulted from the individuality of the observer and which affected the astronomic determination of the time, and I have shown that if these errors vitiate the observations to the point of rendering the precision attributed to them almost illusory, there exists a means of radically eliminating them by suppressing the observer and by substituting for our senses the simultaneous use of two great discoveries of our era, i.e. photography and electric telegraphy. I now ask astronomers if they would not rather suppress the human machine whose imperfections have been revealed to us in such a striking manner, and whose results vary not only over the years, but also from one instant to the next, due to momentary troubles of digestion, of blood circulation, or of nervous fatigue. [81]  

 

In place of the imprecisions of the human observational machine, the photographic apparatus offered an unmistakable, ‘positive’ exactitude. Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne (1806 - 1875), whose images of faces with muscular contractions caused by local electrocution are among the best-known examples of early scientific applications of photography [ill.5], set the tone for this assessment in his Mécanisme de la physiognomie humaine of 1862:

 

Photography is as faithful as the mirror and will allow readers to witness, so to speak, my electro-physiological experiments, and to assess the value of the deductions I have drawn. [82]

 

Duchenne draws up a triangle of photographic evidentiality which includes the image, the scientist, and the reader-cum-viewer who is virtually present in the laboratory and whose perception is instrumental to the visual medium’s force. Duchenne backed the characterisation of photography as a control instrument for the reader by an assertion that the photographic process and reproduction for the publication had been conducted under the supervision of the author - an affirmation which recurred throughout the period and which suggests an interesting corollary between the accuracy of mechanical representation and the notion of authorship. [83]

            We should also note that, a few paragraphs down from these assertions, Duchenne qualifies his judgement about photography’s exactitude by pointing out the possible flaws produced by material imperfections or manipulative lighting. [84]   A feature we will find throughout the period is a great awareness of the technical determinants of photographic representation amongst those scientists who were practising photographers, rather than mere users of photographs. They knew of the degree to which “technical limitations and the resultant distortions register as meaning” (Tagg), necessitating a strict standardisation and critical evaluation of the photographic production process.

            Beside the use of photography as a research tool, its main function was as an illustrative device which could provide books and other publications with a quasi-clinical function. Here, the problem of a faithful reproduction of the original photographs was of prime importance. Alfred Hardy (1811 - 1893) and his assistant A. de Montméja, writing about their illustrated work on skin diseases in 1868, claim that photography is able to render exact images which can replace clinical patients in medical instruction. Hardy points out the crucial role of Montméja’s knowledge of pathology in conjunction with his technical and artistic skills:

 

The artistic, and no doubt most important, part of this work has been confided to one of my students, M. de Montméja, who combines a profound knowledge of skin diseases with an unquestionable talent as photographer and colorist; we can say that his plates represent nature taken from life. [85]

 

Affirming the status of the plates, Montméja for his part makes reference to the low price which will make the work affordable to a wider audience, to the high quality of the technical material, and to Hardy’s authority:

 

By cutting out any intermediary I have succeeded in procuring these prints at a low price, without jeopardising the guarantees of duration and inalterability which advertise the importance of our work. The coloration, confided to able hands, has been executed entirely under my eyes and with the consent of M. Hardy who had the final say. [86]

 

Remarks like these document a keen awareness among nineteenth-century scientists of the technical skills and procedures that were required to turn photography into a useful tool. They also show the way in which such processes related to the photographic were integrated into discursive strategies of affirming authorial power and engineering scientific evidentiality.

            On a semiotic level, photographs generally failed to provide a coherent and sufficient matrix of relevant signs, rendering them legible and meaningful only in combination with data from other sources and in other media. The similarity of objects, whether faces, sections of human skin, or landscapes, made it necessary consciously to encode photographs with previously established characteristics which could then be read as characteristics of the particular object. We will find throughout the following investigation that the assumption of photographic evidentiality hinges on such a tautological structure, in which the signified has to be drawn into the recoding of the signifier for the affirmation of meaning.

            Photography had initially been a fad for amateur inventors, but by the early 1850s an ever-growing market emerged for both amateurs and professional photographers that provided photographic apparatuses, plates, chemicals, and other accessories. A constant flow of inventions and improvements of existing products satisfied the demand for quick innovation in a fashionable market. Photography gradually became easier to handle, and the technical improvements resulted in a fast expansion of the field of vision that could be covered and captured by the camera.

            What was the technical equipment that was available to the scientists interested in photography? [87]   We find descriptions of the most basic outfits in the literature advising anthropologists and other overseas travellers. The equipment suggested by M. V. Portman in an article in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute of 1896 included cameras of various sizes (hand-held, for the tripod, for stereoscopic photography), lenses and shutters for different purposes, varnish for negatives, printing paper, focusing cloth, a focusing glass, lens caps, glass plates, chalk and vaseline as lubricants for wood and metal, waterproof cases, dark tent, dishes and trays, printing frames, chemicals for developing and fixing plates and prints, and a developing lamp. [88]   The list indicates that, even if conducted at its most basic level, photography was an undertaking which demanded a series of preparatory decisions about its precise purpose. It entailed a considerable investment, and it involved a lot of effort on the part of the photographer. Until the advent of the Eastman Kodak process around 1890, which revolutionised amateur photography by delegating the developing and printing procedures to the product supplier, photography largely remained an exercise which demanded training and commitment.

            In addition to the equipment just described, the average commercial portrait studio would be fitted with screens and reflectors, and plain or painted backdrops [ill.8]. In the absence of sufficiently powerful artificial light sources and in order to get the right light exposure, studios were often provided with glass roofs over which curtains could be drawn. Chairs and other studio furniture were equipped with head-rests and supports for other parts of the body to avoid involuntary movements during the long periods of exposure. Depending on the available capital and on the market segment targetted by the enterprise, the studio could furthermore be filled with clothes for the customers to wear, with accessories of all types to be included in the portraits, and with more or less elaborate decorations for the rooms in which customers would wait for their session, or for the developing of their portraits afterwards.

            For more unusual applications, special devices had to be built according to the wishes of the photographer by manufacturers of scientific apparatuses. Thus, Albert Londe devised a whole series of multi-lens apparatuses for his experiments in chronophotography, and Alphonse Bertillon, whose studio at the Préfecture de police served the one main purpose of producing signaletic portraits, developed a special chair which helped to facilitate the preparation of standardised images. The expenses of such specialised studios were high, and, as we shall see later, the evaluation of costs against benefits permeated many of the discussions about scientific photography. In a very practical sense, the economy of visual representation was determined by pecuniary considerations and, in the case of travelling photographers, by the sheer weight of their equipment.

            Three events which took place in Paris in 1882 mark that year as a crucial stage in the development of nineteenth-century scientific photography: at the Préfecture de police, Alphonse Bertillon (1853 - 1914) opened the Service d’identité judiciaire with the anthropometric and photographic studios at its centre; in the Parc des Princes, Etienne-Jules Marey (1830 - 1904) installed the station physiologique where he would continue his chronophotographic experiments on human and animal movements [ill.6]; and Albert Londe (1858 - 1917) joined the photographic service of the neurological clinic of the Salpêtrière where Jean-Martin Charcot (1825 - 1893) had just been awarded the first chair for illnesses of the nervous system, and where Londe would, over the following two decades, develop into arguably the most outstanding scientific photographer of his time. [89]

            The photographic studio at the Salpêtrière had first been installed in 1875 on the initiative of Désiré M. Bourneville who was also, in the following year, among the founders of the serial publication entitled Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière. Throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Charcot’s neurological clinic was among the leading research institutes in Europe. In their recent study on Albert Londe, D. Bernard and A. Gunthert describe two main approaches to the opacity of the human body in the period: the experimental physiology of Marey or Claude Bernard on the one hand, and Charcot’s anatomico-clinical method on the other. The latter combined the clinical observation of the living body with a verification of the diagnosis through a post-mortem autopsy. The application of this method to nervous diseases meant an ambitious innovation, and it provided Albert Londe with a great intellectual challenge as regards scientific representation. [90]   Londe saw the role of scientific photography in its documentary rather than its diagnostic potentials. His work at the Service photographique was meant to provide a “protocole iconique” (Bernard/Gunthert) and included, beside the production of photographs for albums and exhibitions which served to illustrate Charcot’s cases, microscopic photography and the reproduction of paintings [ill.7].

            Londe’s two main publications, La Photographie médicale (1893) and La Photographie moderne (1888; second edition, revised and enlarged almost threefold, 1896), provided comprehensive technical and practical advice on the current applications of photography in science and industry, and indicate the author’s wide-ranging interests and knowledge. Particularly the latter volume was intended to be a substitute for the professional training of photographers which, unlike in countries like Austria, Germany, or England, did not exist in France at the time. Seeking to establish photography as a science, rather than as an ancillary craft, a figure like Alphonse Davanne, founder member of the Société française de photographie in 1854, taught his seminar on photography at the Ecole des ponts et chaussées not in the form of practical training in the studio, but as historical and theoretical courses in the lecture theatre. [91]   Londe’s books were aimed at complementing such academic instruction, underpinning the claim for a full professional status for photographers.

            Londe maintained that the contribution photography could make in the medical field was based on its sincerity and impartiality as a representational medium. Following the principles of Charcot’s anatomo-clinical method, photographs were to be taken of the living body, as well as of details during the autopsy. These images could then be classified and compared, e.g. to trace the development of an illness. The possibility of infinitely multiplying photographs meant that they could serve the documentation of cases as well as the communication between scientists, and support professional and scientific instruction. [92]   Summarising the function of scientific photography as he saw it in the mid-1890s, Londe wrote:

 

Photography which, in the beginning, had been so disdained by scholars, is now one of their most precious tools. Just as it makes up for the insufficiency of the eye in the study of rapid movements, it reveals to the eye phenomena which escape it because of their feeble intensity or their coloration. Let us add that, when the observer gets tired, the photographic plate, on the contrary, is always ready to register the interesting phenomenon without flagging. Finally, the photographic image persists, whereas the retinal image is fugitive: one can therefore study it, compare it to others, and take measurements. [93]

 

As Londe suggests here, the temporal aspects of photography played an important role on different levels. In relation to the production of photographs, speed of execution formed a problem of which Londe was particularly aware through his work at the Salpêtrière where he had to capture the often fleeting expressions and poses of mental patients during their fits. Yet, time was a similarly important aspect with regard to reception. Taking up a recurring topos, Londe claims: “It is indisputable that simply looking at the print says more about [the medical condition] than the description one could have made of it.” [94]   The assumed superiority of the visual over the written document seems to hinge on the instantaneity of the visual impression. This theme, which we will encounter right across the different discussions of human scientific photography, suggests that the latter’s evidential force derives partly from a spontaneous and instantaneous reception of photographs.

            The temporal structure of the photograph likens it to an instance of arrested vision which, unlike human perception, shows no signs of fatigue during its production, and which allows for extensive retrospective analyses. [95]   Comparison and serialisation provide the material for diachronic studies of individual cases, for the synchronic affirmation of typical features, and for comparative analyses of conditions over long periods and across institutional and even national boundaries. [96]

            Londe maintained that photography’s superiority as a representational device was made most obvious in the case of portraiture. [97] The sheer complexity of facial expressions and their variability made it necessary for the physician to draw on photographs for instruction if he wanted to recognise and engrave in his memory certain special facial expressions in order to be able to make faster, more certain diagnoses. Rather than of faces, Londe talks of faciès, i.e. facial types which are characteristic of specific medical or anthropological conditions. Being related to the receptive and mnemonic practice of the scientist, the notion of faciès  thus points us to the ‘internal’ functions and effects that portraits have on the observer.

 


[1] Crary (1990) and Daston/Galison (1992) have convincingly argued that significant shifts in the understanding of vision happened before the advent of photography (Crary), and that photography was not more than one element in the reconfiguration of vision, knowledge and objectivity (Daston/Galison).

[2] For the epistemological importance of visual discourses in eighteenth-century science, cf Stafford (1991) who describes both the “tendency to collapse all sensory experience into the visual and the human body, specifically, into an assemblage of its projected optical effects” (p.28), and the effort to make visually accessible formerly inaccessible domains of the body.

[3] Cf Canguilhem (1966/1978). For the role of positivism in the French nineteenth-century life sciences, cf also the critical assessment by Paul (1985), p.60-92, who seeks to prove that there was no direct influence, and in fact a significant discontinuity, between Comte’s positivist philosophy of science and Bernard’s scientific practice.

[4] An early systematic application of statistical methods in anthropology was presented by Adolphe Quetelet (1835) who received a lot of attention from positivist writers. Recent literature on the history of statistics includes the works of Hacking (1991), Krüger et al. (1987), Porter (1986), and Stigler (1986).

[5] Daston/Galison (1992).

[6] Ibid., p.99-103. Elsewhere, Daston has proposed a distinction between three different concepts of objectivity current in the nineteenth century: ontological, mechanical, and aperspectival, of which the latter relies on an elimination of individual idiosyncracies in the scientific process. According to Daston (1992), the advocates of aperspectival objectivity rejected monocular photography as a distinctly ‘perspectival’ means of visualisation that stressed the existence of a perceiving subject in a particular viewing position (p.616, n.26). Nevertheless, problems of perspectivalism played a significant role in debates about scientific photography, as is indicated by the experiments with multi-ocular cameras in stereoscopy and chronophotography by practitioners like Albert Londe, Etienne-Jules Marey (cf below), and Robert Sommer (cf chapter I.2, below). For the history of notions of scientific objectivity in the eighteenth century, cf also Schaffer (1992).

[7] Ibid., p.110. Stafford (1991) points to the pre-history of this development in the previous century: “The Enlightenment visualization of knowledge through the invention of innovative visual paradigms - evident in prints and illustrated books more even than in painting and sculpture - […] invited interactive participation from a broader spectrum of viewers” (p.24).

[8] Cf Bernard/Gunthert (1993), p.65 [rétine du savant], and p.83-6.

[9] Merzeau (1988), p.65. We should remind ourselves that there is no necessary reason why the chemical solutions used for photographic plates should be sensitive to the same spectrum of rays as the human eye. This technical fact, as Rolf H. Krauss (1992), p.15-6, has observed, opens up the possibility of photography’s subtle alliance with representations of paranormal phenomena. Bernard and Gunthert (1993), p.130-1, quote the examples of Sigmund Freud (1899) who used the photographic apparatus as a metaphor for the virtual and unfocused space in which dreams form their mental images, and of Alfred Binet (1886) who relates psychiatric cases in which, under hypnosis, patients were successfully made to believe that blank cards and landscape photographs that were shown to them were portrait photographs of themselves. These examples suggest a complement to the idea that photographic meaning is generated discursively: the ‘photographic’ surface functions as a screen for the mental images which can be projected, disregarding the actual visual content of the screen. Not the photograph, but human cognition, is the matrix of photographic signification.

[10] Cf Merzeau (1988), p.68. I will argue later that photography was discursively framed to cut both ways, partly substituting immediate human perception and its cognitive processing (e.g. in anthropometric photography, cf chapter II.4, below), partly triggering processes that immediately depended on the productive impulses of mnemonic faculties (e.g. in psychiatric and police photography, cf chapters I.2 and II.4).

[11] Crary (1990), p.18.

[12] Ibid., p.6.

[13] Cf Deleuze (1989), p.188.

[14] Crary (1990), p.13.

[15] Ibid., p.18. Crary’s argument is a critique of Foucault (1975/1977) who contrasted the concepts of surveillance and spectacle rather than seeing the way they coincided. Crary claims that Foucault “neglects the new forms by which vision itself became a kind of discipline or mode of work” (ibid.).

[16] Ibid., p.24. Crary goes on to analyse how the physiological research of the first half of the nineteenth century fostered an understanding of the profound malleability of visual perception (cf esp. p.67-96).

[17] Rose (1990), p.223.

[18] Ibid., p.224.

[19] Leys (1993) investigates related issues with regard to the American sociological school of the late-nineteenth, early-twentieth century, which was figure-headed by George Herbert Mead (1863 - 1931) and influenced by Gabriel Tarde’s notion of society being a process constituted by the dual principle of imitation and suggestion (cf Tarde (1890)).

      [20] Wiltshire (1978), p.236.

[21] Spencer (1881), pt.I, p.62.

[22] Spencer (1868), p.473.

[23] Spencer (1900), p.122.

[24] For Tönnies’ critique of Spencer, cf Tönnies (1889/1925).

[25] Clark in Bynum (1988), vol.III, p.91.

[26] Maudsley (1879), p.93-4; cit Clark in Bynum (1988), vol.III, p.91-2.

[27] These are the terms used by Charles Loomis in his otherwise rather dissatisfying English translation of Tönnies’ convoluted German prose.

[28] Cf Tönnies (1887), pt.II, §4.

[29] Cf ibid., pt.III, §2 [nominell, ideell, fiktiv].

[30] Cf ibid., pt.III, §2 [... wie eine Maske vor ihr Antlitz halten].

[31] Cf ibid., pt.II, §8.

[32] Meynert (1872/1892), p.35 [... die vom eigenen Leibe ausgehenden Erscheinungen durch ihre stete Gegenwart bald an Befestigung im Bewußtsein, an Intensität durch Wiederholung alle discontinuirlichen Erscheinungen der Aussenwelt (übertreffen)]; cf also W. Krauss (1989), p.216-24.

[33] Meynert (1884), p.162 [... die meist wiederholten Wahrnehmungen der Aussenwelt, sowie die am öftesten reproducirten Erinnerungsbilder und hauptsächlich mit Affecten verbundenen Erinnerungsbilder, die gleichfalls sehr feste Vereinigungsbilder bilden. […] Der Stoff der secundären Individualität liegt aber aussen von den Grenzen des Leibes. Die Individualität wird also eine […] viel von der Aussenwelt einschliessende Funktion].

[34] Meynert (1888/1892), p.174 [Das Ich ist ein unüberschaubarer Coordinationsact der im Gehirn zu Wege kommenden Wahrnehmungen, Gedanken, Gefühlsimpulse […], dessen Unüberschaubarkeit sich in der Erscheinung der Freiheit ausspricht].

[35] Durkheim (1893/1984), p.4 [Mets-toi en état de remplir utilement une fonction déterminée]. For the corollary between statistics and the concept of normality in Durkheim, cf Hacking (1991), p.170-9.

[36] My analysis in chapter II.5, below, will deal with this point in relation to studio photography.

[37] Galton (1883), p.231.

[38] Foucault (1966/1970).

[39] Cf Stocking (1968) and (1987).

[40] For a “massive pharaonic biography” (Sekula) on Galton, cf Pearson (1924), esp. vol.II, ch.XII, “Photographic Research and Portraiture”, p.283-333; for Galton’s use of statistics, cf Hacking (1991), p.180-8; for recent, critical discussions mainly of Galton’s experiments with composite photographs, cf Green (1984b), Sekula (1986), and Schmidt (1991).

[41] Cf Galton (1869), and  Galton (1883), p.177-271.

[42] On Eugenics, cf Searle (1976), and Léonard (1983).

[43] Galton (1883), p.335-6.

[44] Sekula (1986), p.19.

[45] Galton (1883), p.222. Galton remarks that Herbert Spencer mentioned, in conversation, his own ideas for composite portraiture using transparent papers. Others seem to have had ideas for similar processes, independently of Galton (cf ibid., p.340). Composite photography was regularly quoted in contemporary publications (e.g. by Alphonse Bertillon, Albert Londe, Cesare Lombroso, Adolf Bär) and played a significant role in criminological debates of the 1890s. Batut (1887) provided the first comprehensive French account of composite photography (cf chapters I.3 and II.4, below; for further references, cf Schmidt (1991), p.29, n.2). For terminological clarification I should add that the ‘type’ is an example which possesses all the dominant traits of a given group, while the ‘characteristic’ image locates the typical in an individual.

[46] Galton (1883), p.14-5.

[47] Sekula (1986), p.19.

[48] Schmidt (1991), p.20.

[49] Galton (1883), p.350.

[50] Sekula (1986), p.42.

[51] Schmidt (1991), p.21 [... weil die Fotografie mit ihrem Authentizitätswert die Vorurteilsstruktur kaschiert und ein Wahrheitszertifikat ausstellt].

[52] Galton (1883), p.343.

[53] In this passage, it is rather Galton’s aim to establish composites as equal to regular photographs.

[54] Galton (1902), p.5.

[55] Ibid., p.7. The reduction to one seventh of life-size in anthropometric portraiture was established internationally by Alphonse Bertillon in the 1880s (cf chapter II.4, below).

[56] Galton (1883), p.362.

[57] Ibid., p.13.

[58] Ibid., p.18.

[59] Ibid., p.354.

[60] Nelson Goodman (1969) and, more recently, David Freedberg (1989) have forcefully argued for reinstating emotion, meditation and memory as crucial cognitive faculties. I have my reservations about the universalism that seems to underlie their arguments, but would agree with the claim for historical studies of visual culture to grant these internal modes of perception a high degree of critical attention.

[61] Cf Goldstein (1987), p.49-55.

[62] For a biography of Broca, cf Schiller (1979/1993).

[63] Cf Puccini (1991), p.68.

[64] Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, 1859; Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte, 1869; Società Italiana di Antropologia e di Etnologia, 1870; Anthropological (later Royal Anthropological) Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 1871.

[65] Mantegazza (1871), p.5.

[66] Topinard (1876/1878), p.VI.

[67] Cf Pick (1989).

[68] Other parts of the body which were of particular interest beside the skull included the pigmentation of skin, hair and eyes, the stature, and brain morphology.

[69] Stocking (1968), p.56.

[70] Cf Voget (1975), p.127.

[71] Cf Dias (1991), p.240.

[72] Cf ibid., p.31.

[73] Puccini (1991), p.66 [La naissance de l’anthropologie générale italienne résulte non seulement de l’influence des modèles étrangers mais aussi de la présence italienne d’un courant de pensée laïque et scientiste, et de nombreux et fructueux rapports avec l’Europe de l’empirisme et du sensualisme. Les principaux tenants de ce courant de pensée avaient soutenu - déjà au tout début du XIXe siècle - l’avènement d’une science de l’homme positive et antimétaphysique].

[74] Cf Puccini (1991) on Italy; E. Williams (1985), Dias (1990), and (1991) p.238-46, on France; Stocking (1987) on Britain; Ryding (1975) and Theye (1989) on Germany.

[75] After Broca’s death in 1880, a conflict broke out between Topinard and a group of younger materialists around the archaeologist Gabriel de Mortillet about the question of pure vs. applied science. The first reason given for Topinard’s final eviction from his post at the Ecole d’Anthropologie was that, in 1889, he refused to accord criminal anthropology a place in the Exposition des sciences anthropologiques (cf chapter I.3); for the conflict, cf Hammond (1980), Harvey (1984), E. Williams (1985), Dias (1990), p.VIII.

[76] Cf Topinard (1876/1878), p.5, and (1900), p.VI.

[77] Cf Stafford (1991) for an analysis of the increasing visualisation of knowledge in the eighteenth century.

[78] Cf Mayer/Pierson (1862), and the examples in Rouillé (1989); cf Nesbit (1992), p.14-8, for an historical discussion of the status of the photograph as document.

[79] Mayer/Pierson (1862), cit Frizot/Ducros (1987), p.53/56 [Quand on parcourt les galeries anthropologiques du Muséum, un coup d’œil suffit pour faire comprendre quels services rendra la photographie à l’étude des races humaines. Les plâtres moulées qui s’y trouvent reproduisent bien exactement les formes, mais il leur manque ce quelque chose qui caractérise surtout l’homme, la physionomie. Dans les portraits, sous ces faces plus ou moins bestiales, il y a la vie et toujours un rayon d’intelligence; dans les plâtres, rien que des types inertes, sans vie et sans âme. Ce ne sera pas un des moindres services rendus par la photographie à la civilisation que celui d’avoir permis un jour à la science de recueillir assez de types authentiques pour pouvoir étudier d’une manière complète les races humaines].

[80] On medical photography, cf Gernsheim (1961), Linssen (1971), Fox/Lawrence (1988); cf also Cartwright (1992) on physiological, proto-cinematic experiments, and Merzeau (1988) on the photogenic recording of experimentation data.

[81] Cit Rouillé (1989), p.451-2 [J’ai entretenu plusiers fois l’Académie des erreurs singulières, dépendant de l’individualité de l’observateur, qui affectent la détermination astronomique de l’heure, et j’ai montré que si ces erreurs vicient les observations au point de rendre jusqu’à un certain point illusoire la haute précision qu’on leur attribue, il existe un moyen radical de les faire disparaître en supprimant l’observateur et en substituant à nos sens l’emploi simultané de deux grandes découvertes de notre époque, la photographie et la télégraphie électrique. (...) Je demande maintenant aux astronomes s’il ne vaut pas mieux supprimer la machine humaine, dont les imperfections nous sont révélées d’une manière si frappante, et dont les résultats varient non seulement avec les années, mais aussi, d’un instant à l’autre, avec les troubles momentanés de la digestion, de la circulation du sang ou de la fatigue nerveuse]; cf also ibid., p.454, 466.

[82] Duchenne (1862), cit ibid., p.446.

[83] Cf Duchenne (1862), cit ibid., p.446; for examples of authorial control, cf also, ibid., p.452, 463; for two recent discussions of modern notions of authorship, cf Nesbit (1992), p.88-101, and McCauley (1994), p.30-4. The impact of Duchenne’s research on scientific photography and physiognomics is strangely elusive and seems to parallel that of Johann Kaspar Lavater, whose physiognomical interpretations from the late eighteenth century were oft-quoted, yet seldom used in the nineteenth century. McCauley (1985) addresses the problem and asserts that “the use of photography as a tool better to examine physiognomies cannot be contested. Scientists, like the public at large, believed that the photograph equaled reality.” Likewise, she assumes that Duchenne’s photographs were used by artists: “A picture was, for the purpose of information, worth a thousand words, but a photograph, whereby nature wrote her own story, was as real as the thing itself.” Unfortunately, she does not quote any sources that would affirm this evaluation. A more differentiated picture of the epistemological position of photography should emerge in the course of the present study.

[84] Cf Duchenne (1862), cit Rouillé (1989), p.446-9.

[85] Cit ibid., p.462 [La partie artistique de cette œuvre, et sans contredit la plus importante, a été confiée à un de mes élèves, M. de Montméja, qui joint à une connaissance approfondie des maladies de la peau un talent incontestable de photographe et de coloriste; nous pouvons dire que ses planches représentent la nature prise sur le fait].

[86] Cit ibid., p.463 [C’est en faisant abstraction de tout intermédiaire que je suis parvenu à livrer à bas prix ces épreuves, réunissant toutes les garanties de durée et d’inaltérabilité que réclame l’importance de notre ouvrage. Le coloris, confié à des mains habiles, s’exécute entièrement sous mes yeux, avec la sanction de M. Hardy, qui juge en dernier ressort].

[87] For accounts of the technical history of photography, cf Gernsheim (1969), Baier (1977).

[88] Cf Portman (1896); on Portman, cf also chapter I.1, below.

[89] The coincidence was pointed out by Bernard/Gunthert (1993), p.38. For Bertillon, cf Phéline (1985), and chapter II.4, below; for Marey, cf Dagonet (1987) and Braun (1993).

[90] Cf Bernard/Gunthert (1993), p.103-13. The authors characterise Charcot’s own attitude towards photography as rather ambiguous. They point out that he makes little use of the medium and hardly ever comments on it, and caution against equating Londe’s published works or the Iconographie photographique with the ‘missing’ photographic theory of Charcot. They mention an exceptional instance when Charcot uses a series of Londe’s photographs in a demonstration and for the subsequent publication of a case of male hysteria which was characterised by all the typical symptoms of female hysteria (cf ibid., p.109, and p.126-8).

[91] Cf ibid., p.71.

[92] Londe (1896), p.650, 664.

[93] Ibid., p.545 [La photographie qui avait été si dédaignée au début par les savants est au contraire maintenant un de leurs plus précieux auxiliaires. De même qu’elle supplée à l’insuffisance de l’œil dans l’étude des mouvements très rapides, de même elle lui révèle des phénomènes qui lui échappent à cause de leur faible intensité ou de leur coloration propre. Ajoutons encore que, si l’observateur se fatigue, la plaque photographique au contraire est toujours prête à enregistrer le phénomène intéressant, sans défaillance aucune. Enfin l’image photographique reste, tandis que l’image rétinienne est fugitive: on peut donc l’étudier, la comparer avec des autres, faire des mesures].

[94] Londe (1893), p.68 [Il est indiscutable qu’un simple coup d’œil jeté sur cette épreuve en dit plus long que la description que l’on pourrait en faire].

[95] Cf the examples in Rouillé (1989), p.452, 463, and in Bernard/Gunthert (1993), p.129.

[96] Following his discussion of medical portraiture, Londe (1896) writes about the photographing of other body parts, especially of hands and feet, and of the ill body in crisis: “C’est surtout dans l’étude des manifestations de la grande hystérie que la photographie interviendra avec le plus grand succès” (p.657-8). The latter refers to the crucial work he did documenting Charcot’s famous cases of hysteria. The ensuing sections on chronophotography and special artificial lighting devices are also related because it was in Charcot’s clinic that Londe was met with the material problems which challenged him to develop new technical devices.

[97] Ibid., p.653-4 [C’est dans (l’étude de la tête) que la supériorité de la photographie sur l’observation éclatera d’une façon évidente]. The instructions Londe gives for scientifically useful portraiture are rather terse and simple. In the context of his discussion of judicial photography, he presents Alphonse Bertillon’s signaletic portraiture of standardised full-face and profile images taken at a standard size as the model for all areas of anthropological research (p.636-48). A section on the aesthetics of portraiture (p.287-91) makes some brief and conventional suggestions for the composition of regular studio portraits (cf below, chapter II.5).