![]() ![]() #GALTON COMPOSITE PHOTOGRAPHY ARCHIVE#The edge to edge, wall to wall, floor to ceiling hang of the tightly framed faces, divided into alphabetical sections for ease of reference to the accompaying checklist of names, suggested the logic and structure of a photographic archive and catalogue. ![]() I don’t think the Bicentennial has produced any-real tough works of art, someone really saying something.2Įven if this ‘ourselves’ had both its geographical and cultural epicentre at Bondi Junction, the highly potent figure of ‘200’ portraits, repeated in all the press publicity, implied national coverage by way of Bicentennial metonymy and sheer magnitude. I was able to say it’s time to have a really hard look at ourselves … and start thinking ‘what are we all about? what are we really celebrating’. Jon Lewis’ 200 portraits, although all photographed at the same proximity and under the same lighting conditions as required by Galton’s composite portraiture, celebrate diversity, not some ideal racial norm.īut then Lewis did see his work, in some sense, as a ‘national portrait’. Surely the comparison was perverse and gratuitous. Why couldn’t I get the cold gothic horror of Galton out of my mind? On a pleasant Saturday afternoon I stood in a pleasant Paddington art gallery looking at a fascinating exhibition by one of Sydney’s nicest photographers. It would be a generic portrait - the physiognomical index of the qualities of each character type.Ĭomposite portraiture was only part of Galton’s detailed anthropometric investigations which were undertaken to aid natural evolution by enabling the British race to breed deviance and degeneracy out of itself. Thus the overall impression of the composite would represent the innate norm around which the individual samples deviated. Those features held most in common built up density to become more distinct than the individually variant physical characteristics. All the portraits of each character type were copied onto a single photographic plate. From a Lieutenant in the Royal Engineers he obtained portraits of ‘the vigorous’, from the Director of Prisons he obtained portraits of ‘the villainous’ (which he subdivided into murderers and thieves), and from Guys Hospital he obtained portraits of ‘the diseased’ (sufferers of tuberculosis). ![]() Jon Lewis Coventry Gallery September 20-24, 1988īack in 1883 the British eugenicist Sir Francis Galton published Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development in which he described his method of ‘composite portraiture’.1 In order to determine the essential physiognomical characteristics of any given social class, racial strain or behavioural type, Galton had devised a fiendish photographic method exactly analogous to statistical distribution analysis.įirst he collected individual portraits of members of a designated character type. ![]()
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