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About the project

This project, led by researcher Lila Brustad, will explore the relationship between a pseudo-scientific method of photography developed by Eugenicists, and the statistics that determine what images users see on TikTok and Instagram. The project will be working towards a digital exhibition, as well as a programme of social media activism, engaging with archived composite portraiture in the Galton Laboratory Collection.

Francis Galton used photography to create indices of moral, psychological, and intellectual ‘value’. Composite portraits were made by placing multiple portraits of people grouped by their supposed moral, intellectual, or psychological character, on the same plate. By using multiple exposures, facial features layered on top of each other so that physical similarities within a group were emphasized while differences faded away. This project takes interest in the surjective relationship between the visual judgments made in these composite photos and judgements used in algorithms in TikTok and Instagram.

On TikTok and Instagram, algorithms and monitors are thought to look at people’s facial features to determine if the creator should have more or less reach. Instagram and TikTok create a space of homogenized faces, class status, race, and ability - just as Galton’s photos emphasized some features while others disappeared in a process that was meant to lead to a physical world homogenization similar to that happening in these apps.

±õ³¾²¹²µ±ð:ÌýGALTONÌýPAPERS 158 -ÌýCompositeÌýphotographs of family likenesses. Part ofÌýGalton's research into heredity and genetics. February 1882.Ìý© UCL Creative Media Services