Dr. John Shaw Billings
Craniology: Composite Photographs Ca. 1885-1887
Albumen prints
The New York Public Library Photography Collection

Eugenics was the invention of the British amateur scientist Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911), a cousin of Charles Darwin. The son of a prosperous family, Galton pursued scientific investigations in diverse subjects including heredity, physical anthropology, geography, and meteorology. The term "eugenics," from a Greek root meaning "good in birth," was coined by Galton in 1883, though he began writing on eugenical ideas in the 1860s. In the book Hereditary Genius (1869), he wrote about accomplished men from a period spanning two centuries, the majority of whom were from families of "good reputation." Such families, he decided, were more likely to produce talented offspring. Galton concluded that it was possible to produce "a highly gifted race of men" by the process of selective breeding, which he later termed "positive" eugenics. Discouraging the reproduction of "undesirables" was subsequently termed "negative" eugenics.

Galton believed that photography was a truthful, precise scientific tool. He began to use the medium about 1878, inventing a technique he called composite photography; he thought that facial characteristics correlated with mental traits and that composite portraiture was a kind of "psychological inquiry." Galton used both extant photos and portraits that he took himself to make his composites. He first experimented with existing head shots of British prisoners, distilling the "typical" physiognomic features of each criminal group by re-photographing several of the portraits onto the same photographic plate to make a composite portrait. But Galton was disappointed with the outcome: the portraits seemed merely to illustrate "the common humanity of a low type." Criminals blended too easily with other members of the lower classes.

Nevertheless, Galton experimented until the end of his life with a variety of techniques for making composites, including placing strips of mirrors at different angles to images and viewing the results through a telescope and creating compound photos with a copy-camera of his design. Despite his odd improvisations, Galton claimed that composite imagery was "a system of pictorial statistics." Galton spent the last decade of his life promoting the English eugenics movement. He was knighted in 1909.