ABSTRACT
Despite the descriptive specificity of portrait subject’s appearance, the composite photograph reveals face of young man who never existed. Literary scholar Bluford Adams has argued that New England Anglo-Saxons from whom the Brahmins originated even saw themselves as “better” than their European ancestors because the New Englanders shared a lineage with the Puritans, who were deemed “a vigorous and good stock.” Elmer Ernest Southard argued that “the problem of aristogenics may perhaps best be begun in these states and others near the head of the list.” Composite portraits were thought to prove the connections between a group’s physical attributes and its perceived intelligence, talents, and deviant inclinations, and to define a typology, or a set of common physical characteristics for a group, deemed either negative or positive. As Francis Galton explains, composite photography is achieved by exposing an archive of individual portraits on a single negative to create a cumulative singular image that represents the whole data set, or group.
