La photographie, la physionomie, et le racisme – translation
Photography, Physiognomy, and Racism
Stevie Ballas
March 11, 2023
What was the relationship between photography, physiognomic theories, and racism?
The origin of physiognomy goes back to ancient Greece. Pythagoras chose his students according to their faces; in his view, there were faces characteristic of a gifted student. Aristotle thought that having a large head meant a person was wicked. Nineteenth-century criminology intensified physiognomic misconceptions with Francis Galton’s composite portraits and the work of Cesare Lombroso. I will examine physiognomic, discriminatory portraits and how this photographic tradition manifests today.
Cesare Lombroso, the Father of Anthropological Criminology
Cesare Lombroso, an Italian psychiatrist, believed that criminality was hereditary. There were “born criminals.” They could be identified by their physical characteristics (the pseudoscience of physiognomy) (Granieri, 173). Lombroso wrote a case study on Giuseppe Villella, a thief from southern Italy. Villella suffered additional discrimination because he was a southern Italian. When Lombroso found a mark on Villella’s skull, he made racist comparisons with the skulls of so-called “inferior races” in Bolivia and Peru, and with animals, falsely associating criminality with race and dehumanising both criminals and people of colour (Granieri, 175). Lombroso’s work and his “anthropological criminology” created a harmful image of the “born criminal” that persists to this day.
Portraits and Discriminatory Photography
Head of a Criminal Epileptic
Head of a Criminal Epileptic, image from Criminal Man, According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso (1911)
We see a man (his age is hard to determine) with short hair and a moustache. His jacket hangs loosely over his shoulders, and he wears a vest, trousers, and gloves. The backdrop is white, and the man is seated with his hands on his knees. His facial expression is hard to read, but his eyes are melancholy. He gazes off into the distance. The lighting on his face is extremely low, and the shadows on it are dark. The centre of the photograph is his chest. His hands and trousers are dark, and he looks dirty and shabby. The caption reads: Head of a Criminal / Epileptic.
According to Lombroso, epileptics are dirty and shabby because they are social deviants with a natural propensity for crime. For Hippocrates, epilepsy had a divine origin. In the nineteenth century, epilepsy was terrifying because of the striking seizures (Granieri, 173). Lombroso believed that alcoholism, venereal diseases, malnutrition, and epilepsy were causes of moral and physical degeneration, and he associated these causes with the idea of the born criminal (Granieri, 177). Here, we see how the image of a “born criminal” helps create a harmful, reductive story based on inaccurate facts and loose correlations.
Patient
Patient, Surrey County Lunatic Asylum, Hugh Welch Diamond, 1850–58
We see a young woman wearing a patterned dress with long hair. The backdrop is a dark curtain, and the woman’s expression is playful. One hand rests at her side, the other on her lap. She smiles faintly, and her eyes are amused but melancholy at the same time; her face is difficult to read. She sits in a dark wooden chair.
The woman in the portrait is a patient of Hugh Welch Diamond, a nineteenth-century psychiatrist who used photography to document his patients and to identify how mental illness could supposedly be read on their faces; Diamond was a supporter of physiognomy. The woman’s expression here is mocking; perhaps she is questioning the legitimacy of physiognomy. Her elegant pose is interesting and suggests the rigidity and artificial nature of the portrait; the only natural element in the image is her smile, a kind of sly rebellion. Medical photography intensified discriminatory photography because of the belief in photography’s absolute objectivity and in the dehumanisation of those it portrays (Wade, 2016).
Anton Otto Krauser
Anton Otto Krauser, Apache, image from Criminal Man, According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso (1911)
We see a young bare-chested man with striking tattoos. His arms are crossed over his stomach, and he wears dark trousers. The man is muscular and has a scar under his eye. He stares off into the distance, and the background is white. On his chest we see two sailors, and between them a ship and a crown. On his arms, he has an image of Sisyphus with his rock in a relaxed pose, and a ship’s mast. The caption reads: Anton Otto Krauser / Apache.
Lombroso’s portrait of Anton Otto Krauser creates an image of the born criminal: dirty, tough, passionate, strong, and dangerous (Granieri, 177). With this kind of portrait, Lombroso constructs the image of the pazzo morale, or “moral madman,” and creates a manual for identifying deviants (Granieri, 177). The tattoo of Sisyphus is particularly interesting; the myth of Sisyphus is a story of cruel punishment and futile labour: Sisyphus is condemned by the gods to push a rock up a hill for eternity. At the summit, the rock rolls back to the bottom and Sisyphus must start again. But the tattoo is rebellious, because Sisyphus is leaning on the rock. In a similar way, people like Anton Otto Krauser recognise that they cannot change the rigid attitudes of physiognomists and criminologists, so why try?
Contemporary Photography: Ken Gonzales-Day
Contemporary photographer Ken Gonzales-Day examines how physiognomy persists in museum archives.
Untitled (Henry Weekes, Bust of an African Woman, based on a photographic image of Mary Seacole, and Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, Bust of Mme Adélaïde Julie Mirleau de Neuville, née Garnier d’Isle. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA), 2011, Ken Gonzales-Day, chromogenic print.
In this photograph, we see profile views of two female busts facing each other. The bust on the left is based on the image of Mary Seacole, a Jamaican and British woman who played a key role in the nursing profession during the Crimean War. Sculpted by Henry Weekes in 1859, it is paired with the bust on the right, based on the image of Mme Adélaïde Julie Mirleau de Neuville, daughter of architect Jean-Charles Garnier d’Isle, who designed Madame de Pompadour’s estate Bellevue. The sculptor is Jean-Baptiste Pigalle (1750s). The background is black, accentuating the shadows on the busts’ faces. Although the women face each other, their gazes are directed elsewhere. Both women appear to smile, but Mary Seacole’s smile is troubling, while Adélaïde’s smile is serene.
Gonzales-Day’s Profiled series examines how physiognomy persists in museum busts. Here, the photograph stages a comparison between representations of a white woman and a Black woman. Why is there pain in Mary Seacole’s eyes, while Adélaïde Julie Mirleau de Neuville appears joyful? The difference is that we are (painfully) aware of the lack of objectivity in these portraits. For nineteenth-century positivists, photographic portraits counted as absolute proof of their theories.
Modern Effects
“Police used an image of the suspect taken from a fake driver’s license left at the scene (left) to run a facial recognition scan. It returned a ‘high profile comparison’ to Nijeer Parks (right).” CNN (2021).
In this image, we see two men side by side for comparison. Both are African American, and the photograph resembles a mugshot or a Bertillon-style portrait parlé. The photo on the left is blurry and grainy, with dark shadows. The man on the left has a beard and moustache, as does the man on the right. The right-hand photo is clearer, with light reflecting on the man’s forehead, cheeks, and lips. The men’s eyebrows have different shapes, and their noses and nostrils also differ. The hairlines are different. The man on the left wears a black shirt; the one on the right a white shirt and dark coat.
Facial recognition technology is increasingly popular in public spaces and media. It is dangerous: facial recognition often misidentifies people of colour (Monteiro, 4). We see this in the case of Nijeer Parks in February 2019, a Black man wrongly identified by facial recognition. The errors of the technology show that physiognomy is not dead; it has simply changed form. According to facial recognition, “born criminals” are now Black people. Physiognomy changes shape, but the danger of this pseudoscience is no less frightening.