How to describe a generic face? The issue that had once been resolved by painting and drawing in rendering ideal ‘types’ was opened again by the arrival of photography in the mid-nineteenth century. The mechanical technology of photography afforded a precision unavailable to the human hand, with the result orienting towards the specific and idiosyncratic. If a photograph was always of an individual, the project of the generic face, if rendered photographically, had to be reconceived. In what follows, I examine the practice of composite photography proposed by statistician and pioneering eugenicist Francis Galton, a method of overlaying multiple exposures onto a single frame. On his own terms, Galton achieved a generic face which had significant bearing on later institutional uses of the photographic camera especially where it concerned the identification of racialised subjects. What is less known is what Galton learned from the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge, namely the use of the medium to produce positive proof of a hitherto invisible phenomenon. Muybridge's photographic evidence of a galloping horse's simultaneously lifted legs demonstrated for Galton that race, which he took to be a similarly obscure visual phenomenon, could likewise be verified through photographic means. Though Galton was not the only person that produced photographic studies of racialised subjects, he was the first to attempt to provide visual and quantifiable form for previously invisible racial markers within the face, thereby ‘proving’ the existence of race.

The entry of photography into scientific research in the nineteenth century had far-reaching implications for the study of the face. The fields of physiognomy and phrenology had long been practised for determining a person's character from their physical attributes, and the new medium revitalised both. Photography offered what appeared to be a rigorous, scientific basis that would dispense with the occultist connotations of each, which were then taken as popular science. The acute study of the face, in turn, profoundly affected the development of the medium itself. As Tom Gunning notes, both the study of the face and the development of photography were driven by a ‘gnostic mission’, which was a desire to see, and by extension to know, the face in its slightest and most fleeting expressions.