ABSTRACT
The technique of composite portraiture developed by the Victorian scientist Francis Galton, who sought to compose images of average, typical faces through the superimposition of individual photographic portraits, shows striking similarities to the statistical concept of the “average man” proposed by the Belgian social statistician Adolphe Quetelet. The exploration reveals common conceptual bases of the historical average figures but also the project’s dissimilar agendas and epistemological differences in visual and numerical reasoning. These 19th-century approaches to constructing and visualising typical, average representatives of social groups will be examined in relation to and contrasted with the figure of the “everybody”. And even though there are connections between the concepts, we will see that, as normative and exclusionary constructions, 19th-century composite portraits, do not usually qualify as everybody figures. Some positively connoted composites, however, celebrate a common descent and a eugenically tainted future and exhibit characteristics of the popularising and identificatory function of “everybodies”. Around the turn of the 21st century the technique of composite portraiture—which in its historical scientific use is often referred to as pseudoscience—was revived in the arts and popular culture and the photographic technique was translated into new digital media. While some artworks take a critical stand in relation to the technique, others highlight the universalising and identificatory potential of composite faces and treat them as “visual everybodies”. Raul Gschrey’s diachronic reading of composite portraits of the past 150 years reveals a change of meaning of the images, from historical scientific typecasts with derogatory taxonomic as well as eugenic connotations, to the current composite faces that are praised for their averaging, all-encompassing, hybrid nature and their potential to address each and every one of us. Furthermore, this perspective allows for the critical contextualisation of current strategies of visualising common faces: their problematic history and uncanny presence, their temptation and appeal as everybody-faces.
