WORKSHOP 2
Friday 25 March, Wellcome Trust
Reading Faces: Physiognomy and Facial Typing
ABSTRACTS
LARA PERRY
19thC cartes de visites and the question of photographic likeness
The carte de visite - small, multiple portrait photographs - soared to popularity
amongst all classes of Britons in the early 1860s. This phenomenon of mass
culture is of interest to its historians typically in its social dimension, but not in
terms of its visual practice, since carte de visite are unprepossessing as
objects: they are characteristically small, flimsy, repetitive and predictable.
Even contemporary commentators tended to treat the iconic or indexical
likeness produced in the carte de visite as inadequate at best, a judgment
which was affirmed by variety of sharp practices and deceptions circulated
around and through carte photography during the period.
If the carte de visite did not achieve its likeness at least primarily through its
convincing reproduction of the sitter's appearance, what were the
mechanisms of likeness that did function in the carte? Two notable aspects of
photographic culture in the 1860s - the performative/theatrical mode that is
chiefly associated with 'art' photography, and the repetitive nature of carte
photography, are here presented as alternative modes of likeness that
functioned in the context of 1860s photographic portraiture, as documented in
two carte albums held by the National Portrait Gallery.
TIM VALENTINE (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Face–space: A psychological perspective of similarity and difference
between faces.
Face processing poses a considerable challenge. To recognise a face we
need to be able to distinguish it from many similar faces, seen under widely
variable viewing conditions (e.g. changes in lighting, expression, viewpoint
and age). To do this, we make some strong assumptions about faces. These
assumptions can be revealed by facial illusions that will be demonstrated. Not
only do we need to distinguish between different faces, but similarities help us
to make judgements about people. For example, we can judge age, ethnicity,
health and emotional state. The face-space framework, which helps us to
think about the similarity structure of faces and its mental representation, will
be introduced. Psychological insights into the perception of caricature,
attractiveness and ethnicity will be discussed.
VICKI BRUCE (Newcastle University)
Resemblance and Identity
My own interest in face recognition was stimulated in the mid 1970s by two
seemingly contradictory observations. First, that memory for faces in
laboratory conditions was very good – much better than for other apparently
equally complex and meaningful patterns; second, that memory for faces by
witnesses to crimes was very poor, and a large number of mistakes were
made that led to the wrongful conviction of innocent people falsely identified.
Much of my work in the 35 years since then has been aimed at understanding
this paradox and also at exploring ways to improve how images of faces are
used to identify criminals. In this talk I will describe how research into the
identification of people in line-ups and the use of CCTV images shows how
easily confused people are by a resemblance between face images, and how
such resemblance can lead to a false assumption of identity. In contrast, one
reason why it is difficult to get witnesses to ‘recall’ recognisable faces using
composite systems (e.g. E-fit) is that these systems seem, at best, able to
yield images of general ‘type’ resemblance, whereas what is needed for an
investigation is an image that can be identified as someone in particular.
However, a sense of resemblance can be very useful too. I will describe how
some of the work on the new composite system ‘Evo-Fit’ has tried to build
upon participant-witnesses’ feelings of resemblance to generate composite
images more likely to be identified by those familiar with them.
PETER HAMILTON (Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, Paris)
"Policing the Face: Photography, Portraiture and Social Order"
The invention of photography in the 1830s promised to unite art and science
and create both novel and more accurate methods of depiction and
documentation. Despite the difficulties of early processes for photographers
and sitters alike, it was photographic portraiture's rapid rise to popularity that
encouraged its diffusion to other spheres.
The portrait photograph was rapidly adopted by the new sciences and
technologies to provide empirical evidence for theories of evolution,
phrenology, racial types, insanity and criminality. A system of scrutiny or
'surveillance' of the face - and to a lesser extent the body - emerged in the
latter part of the nineteenth century. It has had a lasting and profound
influence on society, culture and the arts ever since.
This paper will discuss the multiple influences on photography during its
emergent period, and trace some of the key implications in the development
of photographic and organisational techniques for social surveillance through
facial recognition. A key feature of the photographic surveillance process has
been the creation of organisations and bureaucratic processes that
"rationalise" the production and use of such images for purposes of social
control.
In contrast to the "official" institutional uses of portraiture as an (imperfect)
device of social control, the "artistic" uses of photography as a method of
depicting beauty, character, personality, social identity, etc, have proved to
be unwilling bedfellows in the processes of surveillance. The paradoxes to
which this leads will also be touched upon to conclude the paper.
SIBYLLE ERLE (Bishop Grosseteste University College, Lincoln)
“Read the text, look at the image, develop your ‘Physiognomical
Discernment’: Problems of Representation in Johann Caspar Lavater’s
Essays on Physiognomy”
Johann Caspar Lavater’s physiognomy was first published in German
(Physiognomische Fragmente) in the 1770s and then quickly abridged,
revised, extended and translated into Dutch, French and English (Essays on
Physiognomy). The physiognomy gained, in the first instance, in portraits.
Lavater was an avid collector and included more and more engravings; and
while introducing his new - scientific – approach to physiognomy, he not only
commented on long-established face-reading traditions but also experimented
with both methods and machines of likeness-taking and even devised a
teaching programme. That the extra material made teaching ‘Physiognomical
Discernment’ virtually impossible, didn’t concern him, because he believed
that if readers looked at a representation of a true, that is, accurate likeness,
they would feel exactly what he had felt when he examined the plate. Readers,
according to Lavater, would be subjected to the same bodily experience and,
therefore, agree with his physiognomical judgement. What complicated the
development of “Physiognomical Discernment” as well as the so-called
moments of recognition is that Lavater continually complained about the
engravers and artists working for him: he had to put up with lack of precision
and much incompetence. The two main, competing English translations - on
which this paper will focus – were published from 1789 onwards and are
referred to as the Holcroft translation (named after Thomas Holcroft) and the
Hunter translation (named after Henry Hunter). According to Lavater’s friend,
the Swiss-born painter Henry Fuseli, the Hunter translation was the best
‘Lavater’ to date: the plates were excellent, because they had been done with
the ‘most discriminating exactness and attention’. When taking a closer look
at Fuseli’s contributions to the Hunter translation, however, it emerges that he
not only saw to correcting the mistakes of the French edition but also made
some small adjustment which enhanced as well as undermined Lavater’s
physiognomical readings.
NATASHA RUIZ-GóMEZ (University of Essex)
Individual and Multiple: Rodin and Physiognomy
This paper proposes a new reading of the sculpture of Auguste Rodin (18401917) based on an examination of his ambivalent relationship to the theory of
physiognomy and its project of reading individuals’ physical characteristics for
morality and intellect. Rodin used physiognomy and the related study of
regional type to motivate sculptures—from intimate studies of hands to major
commissions, such as the Burghers of Calais (1895) and the Monument to
Balzac (1898)—but also subverted both discourses by forcing multivalent
readings of the human form.
Rodin’s preparations for both the Burghers of Calais and the Monument to
Balzac involved intensive research on physiognomy and regional type—he
studied natives of Calais and of Touraine, where Honoré de Balzac (1799–
1850) was born—but the completed works resist physiognomic legibility. The
visage of the Monument to Balzac is grotesquely distorted, its body
enshrouded in a long cloak. The figure serves as a monument to genius
rather than as a testament to the validity of the well-known theories that
informed its genesis. In the final version of the Burghers of Calais, Rodin
used the same head for three of the figures, simultaneously exploiting and
flouting physiognomy’s popular authority—the innovation that Leo Steinberg
calls ‘multiplication’ announces Rodin’s modernity as it undermines the
physiognomic project. Considering the works in the framework of
physiognomy and regional type reveals that the two discourses were factors
that prompted Rodin’s experiments with replication. In other words, the
challenge that Rodin perceived in the pseudo-scientific discourse of
physiognomy helped push him to become the ‘sculptor of modern life’.
KAREN INGHAM (Swansea Metropolitan University)
A Type of Uncertainty: an interdisciplinary response to the UCL Francis Galton
Archive
The Victorian polymath Francis Galton is a controversial figure yet the
importance of his legacy to 21st century medical and surveillance technologies
cannot be over stated, from finger prints to retinal identity scans, reproductive
technologies, bioinformatics and genetics. But Galton is also of interest to
those in the arts and humanities, not least because of the uneasy beauty of
his photographic composite typologies. For the past year I have been in
discussion with Galton curator Natasha McEnroe and have had access to the
Galton archive. With the intent of creating an interdisciplinary artwork for the
2011 Galton centenary, I have focused on two aspects of his prodigious
research: the composite typologies and his iris studies as manifested in the
glass eye collection framed in moulded metal.
In response to the typologies I am developing a short film and a series of
large-scale photographic ‘thought portraits’, with the working title ‘Variance’, a
term derived from Galton’s pioneering work on statistics. The portraits, which I
refer to as oxymoronic typologies, incorporate confocal and scanning electron
microscopy images of brain activity. These were made during my Science and
Art Research Fellowship with Cardiff Neuroscience Research Group, and are
characteristic of a new generation of interpretively complex brain imaging
‘snapshots’. Photographic portraits of friends and family are layered with
these purportedly ‘living thought’ images creating a visual effect similar to
Galton’s composites. The histories, philosophies and narratives of biomedical
imaging in relation to identity are brought into question, challenging traditional
notions of portraiture by referencing those aspects of the self that reside
below the surface. ‘Variance’ plays with these questions of identity and is
situated in the gaps between knowledge, where speculation and interpretation
contest certainty.
The glass eye collection is reminiscent of Isaac Oliver’s 1600 portrait of
Elizabeth the 1st with her rainbow cloak of many eyes. The cloak is a
metaphor for surveillance and I am designing a contemporary cloak
incorporating Galton’s glass eyes; a piece of wearable technology that acts as
a surveying device. I will talk about these artworks and show examples of
previous Galton informed practice during the workshop.
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
LARA PERRY
What are the different ways that we understand the sitter's role/agency in the
production of a photographic portrait?
What are the historical specificities of concepts of 'likeness' in nineteenth
century cartes de visites?
What is the role of second-order information (i.e. that which is external to the
image itself) in the generation of a likeness?
VICKI BRUCE
Why are we so good at identifying familiar faces and so poor at unfamiliar
ones?
How can we make better use of images of faces from crime scenes (via
cameras or via the witness recall of composites)?
TIM VALENTINE
How do we bind unfamiliar faces to specific events? How do we know where
and when we last saw somebody before?
What skills underlie exceptional face recognition ability?
PETER HAMILTON
How do we develop a history of photography that looks at social processes of
image production, rather than the history of pictorial aesthetics?
Why are there such profound links between science and photography in the
nineteenth century?
What are the social factors that lead to the rise of surveillance through facial
recognition?
What have been the social and cultural consequences of using photographic
techniques to aid social control?
SIBYLLE ERLE
The events of our lives will shape our personalities, which will be expressed
through our bodies - although our bodies may restrict, to some extent, how we
respond to these events. Our bodies are our modes of being in the world, of
interacting with it, and as such, will help to shape this interaction.
Lavater was one of the last to take the soul seriously. His physiognomy was
propelled by the search for divine likeness, which he believed to be
represented in the human face. Lavater’s problem was that he couldn’t find
the perfect portrait. What do Lavater’s struggles tell us about body-soul
relationships in the late 18th century?
Lavater prefers analyzing physiognomical portraits to examining faces. What
does this preference tell us about the use and understanding of the body?