Page 149 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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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 facial
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-registered
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 extension of photography into the social domain.