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Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 41/145
Henry Pickering Bowditch: 12 Boston Doctors 1894.
The physiologist Bowditch was following the photo-composite work of eugenist Francis Galton
some ten years earlier, but I think that this image by Bowditch really demonstrates more clearly
what Galton was trying to do. With a typical Victorian mind-set, Galton was trying to prove that fa-
cial characteristics were not only inherited (he was Darwin’s cousin), but that the moral character
could be inherited too - and detected in the physiognomy. Galton and Bowditch photograph groups
of men (mostly) demonstrating that there was a certain type of physiognomy displayed by criminals
(say) or scientists - or as here, doctors. The composite portraits were made by sandwiching pin-re-
gistered negatives together and exposing the resulting face-sandwich. One hundred years later
(1980s), the art-researcher Nancy Burson used a custom-designed set of digital layering tools for
making digital composite portraits along these lines.
http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/bowditch-henry-p.pdf
This composite strand of expanded photography is still particularly interesting to me. It somehow reveals - or promises to reveal - a commonality of human-ness, and by smudging the edges and idiosyncracies of individuals, there’s a feeling that here is a magical tool (composite portraiture) that can reveal a common ‘soul’ amongst us - an archetypal centrality - as if we were all aspiring to a Buddha-like, essential one-ness. What it did reveal is an unexpected and seemingly powerful ex- tension of photography into the social domain.
The most momentous expansion of any medium was already underway by the 1880s - and it was the worldwide drive to capture motion in photography. The zeitgeist - how to create motion-pic- tures, how to capture the movement of Life - became an overpowering drive as we approached the last decade of the 19th century