The Monstrous, the Meaningless, and Margins of Error: Use of Photography in 19th-Century Scientific Representation

Josh Ellenbogen, a graduate of the Carleton Class of 1992 and a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, will deliver a lecture on Francis Galton’s photographic work entitled “The Monstrous, the Meaningless, and Margins of Error”.

Ellenbogen will discuss Galton’s adventurous endeavor to capture marginal populations through the photographic medium, and how his projects contributed to a new standard that emerged in the 19th century to redefine what comprised a scientifically adequate photograph. This event is free and open to the public.

As an anthropologist and statistician, Francis Galton embarked on a photographic mission in the late 1870s to produce “portraiture of the invisible.” Instead of making photographs of individual objects or things observable to the eye, Galton aimed to create photographs of ideas and concepts that encompassed all individuals within that class. Fro example, rather than photographing individual criminals or lunatics, he sought to capture images that embraced what it looked like or meant to be “the criminal” or “the lunatic.” This project marked an important change in the medium’s standards for creating a scientifically valid photograph; instead of relying on statistical and mathematical formation to define a photograph’s scientific value, photographers began to view how the image captured non-visible entities as a measure of its scientific credibility.