Page 41 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 41/146
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 cinematic zeitgeist - how to create mo- tion-pictures, how to capture the movement of Life - became an overpowering drive as we ap- proached the last decade of the 19th century. The busy innovations of the period 1870-1900 resulted in both live-action cinematography and it’s essential initial methodologies (including in-camera editing, basic cutting and the use of different lenses), and almost at the same time Animation evolved - in different forms eventually settling on cel-animation and stop-motion techniques. One of the core developments leading-up to the movies was the ‘motion-capture’ technique invented by Eadweard Muybridge in the 1870s and 1880s: