COMPOSITE PORTRAITS AND STEREOSCOPIC MAPS
Sir Edmund Du Cane and criminal characteristics—Principle of
composites—Analytical photography—Stereoscopic photographs of
models of mountainous districts
My first idea of composite portraiture arose through a request by Sir
Edmund Du Cane, R.E., then H.M. Inspector of Prisons, to examine the
photographs of criminals, in order to discover and to define the types of
features, if there be any, that are associated with different kinds of
criminality. The popular ideas were known to be very inaccurate, and he
thought the subject worthy of scientific study. I gladly offered to do
what I could, and he gave me full opportunities of seeing prisons and of
studying a large number of photographs of criminals, which were of course
to be used confidentially.
At first, for obtaining pictorial averages I combined pairs of portraits
with a stereoscope, with more or less success. Then I recollected an
often observed effect with magic lanthorns, when two lanthorns converge
on the same screen, and while the one is throwing its image, the operator
slowly withdraws the light from it and throws it on to the next one. The
first image yields slowly to the second, with little sense of discordance
in the parts that at all resemble one another. It was obviously possible
to photograph superposed images on a screen by the simultaneous use
of two or more lanthorns. What was common to all of the images would
then appear vigorous, while individual differences would be too faint
for notice. There would, however, be great difficulty in accurately
superposing them without the aid of expensive apparatus. Then the idea
occurred to me that no lanthorns were needed for the purpose, but that
the pictures themselves might be severally adjusted in the same place,
and be photographed successively on the same plate, allowing a fractional
part of the total time of exposure to each portrait.
My earlier experiments were with the full-face photographs of criminals.
I selected three which were not greatly unlike, and were of the same
size, as judged by measuring the vertical distance between the pupils
of the eyes and the parting of the lips. Out of a thin card I cut a
window of the size of the portrait, and fastened two threads over it, one
vertical, the other crossways. Lastly I made a pin-hole in the card on
either side of the window. Thus provided, I laid each portrait in turn
on the table, and adjusted the card until the cross line passed over the
pupils of the eyes, and the vertical line bisected the interval. Then I
pricked through the two pin-holes the paper on which the portrait was. I
could thus hang all three portraits one behind the other on two pins that
projected from a board, with the assurance that the principal features of
each face would occupy an identical position in front of a fixed camera.
I photographed them in turns. The camera was uncapped during one-third of
the normal time of exposure while the first portrait was in front of it.
Capping it again, I took away the front portrait and exposed the second,
then uncapping the camera I took the second portrait; and similarly
the third. The result was particularly promising; it was difficult to
believe that the composite was not a simple portrait. I tested the truth
of the result by placing the photographs in different order, and by many
other ways. Then I extended its application. The method of composite
portraiture was first published in _Nature_, 1878, and more fully in
the _Journ. Anthrop. Inst._, 1879[51], also in the Journal of the
Photographic Society, at which I exhibited it, and elsewhere. The method
is republished in _Human Faculty_[76].
I gladly acknowledge my indebtedness to Sir Edmund Du Cane not only
for helping me with material for these experiments, but for having, as
he told me, suggested the inclusion of my finger-print system in the
instructions to the Committee of Identification, described in the last
chapter. He was an extremely accomplished man, with high and humane
views, and sympathised with not a few of the subjects on which I have
been engaged.
I have successfully made many composites both of races and of families.
The composites are always more refined and ideal-looking than any one of
their components, but I found that persons did not like being mixed up
with their brothers and sisters in a common portrait. It seems a curious
and rather silly feeling, but there can be no doubt of its existence. I
see no other reason why composite portraiture should not be much employed
for obtaining family types. Composites might be made of brothers and
sisters, parents and grandparents, together with a composite of the
race, each in their due proportions, according to the Ancestral Law (see
chapter on Heredity). The result would be very instructive, but the
difficulty of obtaining the material is now overwhelming. Male and female
portraits blend well together, with an epicene result.
With the help of Dr. Mahomed and the permission of the authorities of
Guy’s Hospital, I took many photographs of consumptive patients and made
composites of them, which are published in the Guy’s Hospital Reports,
vol. xxv. They show two contrasted types, the one fine and attenuated,
the other coarse and blunted. Dr. Mahomed was a very promising physician,
on the eve of becoming well known, when he caught a fever of the same
description, I am told, as that on which he had become an authority, and
died of it in his newly purchased house.
I could not make good composites of lunatics; their features are apt to
be so irregular in different ways that it was impossible to blend them.
I took a photographer with me to Hanwell, where it was arranged that the
patients should sit two at a time on a bench. One of them was to be led
forward and posted in front of the camera, while his place on the bench
was filled by the second patient moving up into it, whose previous place
was to be occupied by a third patient. It happened that the second of the
pair who were the first to occupy the bench considered himself to be a
very mighty man, I forget whom, but let us say Alexander the Great. He
boiled with internal fury at not being given precedence, and when the
photographer had his head well under the velvet cloth, with his body
bent, in the familiar attitude of photographers while focusing, Alexander
the Great slid swiftly to his rear and administered a really good bite
to the unprotected hinder end of the poor photographer, whose scared
face emerging from under the velvet cloth rises vividly in my memory as
I write this. The photographer guarded his rear afterwards by posting
himself in a corner of the room.
Many years later, I tried to perform the exact opposite to composite
photography, namely, to annul all that was typical in a portrait and
to preserve its peculiarities. I called it “Analytical Photography,”
and explained it in _Nature_, 1900, and in the _Photo. Soc. Jour._,
1900-1901. It depends on the fact that a positive and a negative glass
plate, _both in half or still fainter tones_, when held face to face
neutralise the peculiarities of one another, so the effect of their
combination is to produce a uniform grey. My plan was to fix a _negative_
composite in front of a _positive_ portrait of one of its elements, all
in half tones, with the result that the composite abstracted all the
typical portion of the portrait while its peculiarities were isolated
and remained. “Alice in Wonderland” would have described it as the “grin
without the Cheshire Cat.” I succeeded, but the result did not give an
intelligible idea of the peculiarities, the non-essentials being as
strongly marked as the essentials, and the whole making a jumble; so I
went no farther with this process.
In 1882 I published an illustrated memoir in _Nature_ on the conventional
way in which artists had hitherto represented a galloping horse. Mr.
Muybridge had, by means of beautiful photographs of twenty momentary
successive attitudes, recently shown, beyond possibility of cavil, that
the conventional representation was totally untrue to fact. I asked
myself the question why observant artists had agreed for so long a time
in drawing galloping horses with their four legs extended simultaneously,
and why their representation had never been objected to. It occurred to
me that composites of successive attitudes that were too momentary to
be distinguished might answer the question, which it did. When all of
the twenty attitudes are combined in a single picture, the result is
certainly suggestive of the conventional representation, though in a very
confused way. Then, finding by my own observation that it was difficult
to watch all four legs at the same time, also seeing that according to
the photographs of Mr. Muybridge, the two fore legs were extended during
one quarter of a complete motion, and that during another quarter the
two hind legs were similarly extended, I made composites of these groups
separately. Then, cutting them in half and uniting the front half of
the former to the hind half of the latter, a very fair equivalent was
obtained to the conventional attitude. I inferred that the brain ignored
one-half of all it saw in the gallop, as too confused to be noticed; that
it divided the other half in two parts, each alike in one particular, and
combined the two halves into a monstrous whole.
This is a convenient place to speak of the method of stereoscopic maps,
which I devised so long ago as 1863. It was published together with
specimens made for me by my cousin, long since dead, R. Cameron Galton,
in the _Proceedings_ of the Royal Geographical Society[18] of that year.
I cannot fully understand why stereoscopes do not hold a higher position
in popular estimation than they do; it may be partly due to two causes—to
the fact that the two eyes are unequally operative in a larger proportion
of persons than might be supposed, and to the cost and unwieldiness of
the usual stereoscope. Compound lenses give better and wider images than
plain ones, but for common purposes I find that plain ones, mounted as
in an eyeglass, serve quite well enough. Those I generally use are cheap
things, mounted in a strip of wood.
I wished to obtain a map that should have the effect of a model, so
suitable models were procured and photographed stereoscopically. The
result was a perfect success. An unexpected result occurred when a pure
white plaster cast was treated in this way, for it wholly failed to give
the required appearance of a solid, but if grains of dust were sprinkled
over it, much more if names were written on it, the stereoscopic effect
appeared in its full strength. Good models, and therefore stereoscopic
maps made from them, give a far better idea of a mountainous country than
any ordinary map can do, however cleverly it may be shaded. Map-makers
might well pay some attention to stereoscopic maps and to providing cheap
eyeglasses with which to view them.