Some viewers saw the young man in the picture as handsome, romantic, and destined for greatness others had trouble believing that it was an actual picture of Lincoln because it lacked his usual melancholy and “aged wisdom.” This goes to show that physiognomy and phrenology were widely accepted methods of understanding they gave people “scientific reason” to believe what they construed about each other based on a photo. I came across a book about photography during the Civil war and the Great Depression, and it mentions the public’s response to viewing the earliest known photograph of Abraham Lincoln in his thirties (this image was shown in a magazine a few years after his death). But what the images tell the viewers (such as the Victorian scientist) was subject to personal opinion. Photography was no more than a reflection of reality at the time, so believing the images to be true makes sense. I believe that Victorian scientists trusted photography to be accurate because of their understanding of its ability to mirror real life. “In claiming to provide a means for distinguishing the stigmata of vice from shining marks of virtue, physiognomy and phrenology offered an essential hermeneutic service to a world of fleeting and often anonymous market transactions.” This also birthed the typology of the “criminal,” and introduced photography as a method of identifying and tracking criminals. Hiring businesses used phrenology by viewing pictures of their potential future employees to see if they would be able to do the work sufficiently. Phrenology was used to determine if a person was able-minded, capable, and respectable. It was believed, using phrenology, that the surface of the body, particularly the head and face “bore the outward signs of inner character.” Thus, photography could be a tool to track and catalog people for many purposes. According to Sekula, “Each observation or each group of observations is to be defined, not by its absolute value, but by its deviation from the arithmetic mean.” People were not looked at as individuals with unique characteristics they were understood by how far from the average they appeared- the further from the mean they appeared the more likely they led an unfit lifestyle or were mentally unfit for society. Everyone who falls outside of these characteristics are others. This average is the same throughout history: a white, masculine, cis, able-bodied individual. Phrenology, the study of the head as an indication of character and mental abilities, was used in creating the other by subsequently creating an average. These two words are used through the reading to point out the way a photo highlights a person’s capabilities and high traits or their low points and degraded nature. Before I dive into this essay, I would like to note two words that Allan Sekula uses to describe the way a photograph looks at a person honorific and repressive. Usually, the other is someone who does not look or act the same way as a majority group. The other is a term used to define those who are outside of a specific group, they can belong to another group entirely or mirror the same group but with opposite traits. AH 331 History of Photography Spring 2021 Compendium Main Menu Introduction Assignment 1 Assignment 2 Assignment 3 Visualizing Photo History One Image Two Minutes Presentations Author Biographies Galton Composite Portrait 1 media/galtonimage_thumb.jpeg T19:22:59+00:00 AJ Duff 1ec324faa11c42a72705adbb19497e685951d5f6 83 1 Francis Galton, Composite Portraits of Criminal Types, 1877 plain T19:22:59+00:00 AJ Duff 1ec324faa11c42a72705adbb19497e685951d5f6 This page is referenced by: Please enable Javascript and reload the page. This site requires Javascript to be turned on.

Galton composite photography