| . |
|
Heads, or the Art of Phrenology revives an ancient interest in the mind and character. Phrenology, as originally defined is literally the study of mind, but its main concern has been to know oneself through the relationships between mind and body. In ancient times, it involved a search for the physical location of the soul, in the stomach, heart, head, or elsewhere. The mediaeval period took the search into the astrological significance of the face and body. Desires for more rational, objective answers provoked the development in the early 19th century of 'Cranioscopy', the belief that the self is revealed through the shape and protuberances of the skull. This belief in turn was challenged by scientific evaluation, leading to modern approaches of measuring character by 'tests', or of seeking deeper understanding of the self.
Extracts from: Cooper, H. Heads or the Art of Phrenology. London Phrenology Company, 1983 "Photography of the body played a role also in the sciences of psychiatry and physiognomy (an attempt to use facial features as empirical evidence of human character). In the early 1850s Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond, superintendent of the Surrey County Asylum in England, used photography empirically, as an objective tool of psychiatric diagnosis and treatment, and for the identification of the female inmates under his care. A similar belief in photography's power to provide objective documentation is manifested in the series of photographs made in 1862 by the Frenchman Adrien Tournachon, the brother of the photographer Nadar, to illustrate a book entitled Mecanisme de la physiognomie humaine, written by Dr. Guillaume-BenjaminArmand Duchenne de Boulogne, the founder of electrotherapy. In this book Duchenne extended his electrotherapy research to the study of human character from facial features. One of Tournachon's pictures, Effroi (Fright), shows electrodes applied to the nerves and muscles of the face in order to create the facial expression specific to this emotion.
Tournachon's photographs were also used as illustrations for On the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) by Charles Darwin, together with photographs commissioned by Darwin from the Anglo-Swedish photographer Oscar Rejlander. Duchenne, like Darwin, was a positivist, and considered the psyche as something with verifiable, visual aspects. (A few years later Sigmund Freud rejected the privileged status of vision and the visual in Duchenne's notion of psychiatry when he used the verbal interaction of analyst and analysand as the basis of psychoanalysis.) " Physiognomy and criminology came together in the series of photographs made by the British scientist Francis Galton for his inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development. Galton, who founded eugenics (the study of human improvement by genetic control), attempted to systematize yet further the study of criminality. He photographed individuals convicted of crimes of violence, and formed combination portraits of them by printing several negatives on top of each other, so that some sort of visual average or type would emerge. Even less benign were Galton's efforts, in 1885, to form by the same photographic means what he called "composite portraits of the Jewish type."
Extract from Bodyscape, N Mirzoeff, Routledge, 0-415-09801-7 |
|
. |