Harvard’s Composite “Class” Pictures
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12919660 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kris Belden-Adams (0000-0001-9344-6025, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 8 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 125-136 |
| Publication date | 2015-05-04 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Photographies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1754-0763 • E-ISSN: 1754-0771 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/17540763.2015.1054300 |
| OpenAlex | W1807600604 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 11 |
At first glance, John L. Lovell’s Harvard class portraits appear to represent one man and one woman. But instead, these composite photographs personify the “average” appearance of the entire classes of 1887 at Harvard University and the “Annex,” or Boston’s Protestant Brahmin elite. Composite photographs such as these, which held scientific gravity as part of the Harvard-entrenched Positive Eugenics movement, were composed of an incomplete data set. Thus, they offer a revised view of Allan Sekula’s ideas about composite photography’s requisite statistical potency. In addition, the Harvard composites call for a more nuanced articulation of their indexical functions, within the context of late nineteenth-century trends in the production of visual statistics and knowledge
Archaeology · Art · Art history · Articulation (sociology · Class (philosophy · Context (archaeology · Elite · Epistemology · Eugenics · Indexicality · Linguistics · Portrait · Sociology · Visual arts · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law · Philosophy · Philosophy, Science, and History
The Traffic in Photographs
Memories of my Life, by Francis Galton
Composite Portraits, Made by Combining Those of Many Different Persons Into a Single Resultant Figure
The Public and Private History of Eugenics
Veins of Resemblance
Parameters of Vibration, Technologies of Capture, and the Layering of Voices and Faces in the Nineteenth Century
Analytical Photography
Percival Lowell
| Highly cited | No |
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