UCL Museums & Collections
Workshop 2
Reading Faces: Physiognomy and Facial Typing
Friday 25 March 2011, Wellcome Collection
This workshop will look at the impact of
physiognomic theories on portraiture in the 18th- and 19th-centuries and vice versa. It will
consider the porous borderline between photographic portraiture and scientific
and institutional photography of the face in the 19th-century, and
the development of concepts of likeness in scientific images. Topics will
include the use of scientific images to establish norms in facial type, and the
ways in which research into facial type has informed social and cultural
ideologies from the 19th-century to the present day. It will also discuss
the limits and ethics of the use of these technologies for surveillance,
predicting disease, and the extent to which the historical ideas and
technologies of of 19th-century facial typing persist in 21st-century art and science.
Left to right: Carte de Visite, George Lance, image ©National Portrait Gallery, London Francis Galton - Composites of Members of a Family, image ©UCL Library Special Collections
Programme
Chair: Ludmilla Jordanova (Department of History, Kings College, University of London)
Sibylle Erle (Bishop Grosseteste University College Lincoln)
Read the text, look at the image, develop your ‘Physiognomical Discernment’: problems of representation in Johann Caspar Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy
Lara Perry (University of Brighton)
19th-century Cartes de visites and the question of photographic likeness
Tim Valentine (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Face-space: a psychological perspective of similarity and difference between faces
Peter Hamilton (Groupe d’étude de méthodes d’analyse sociologique de la Sorbonne)
Policing the face: photography, portraiture and social order
Natasha Ruiz-Gomez (University of Essex)
Individual and multiple: Rodin and physiognomy
Vicki Bruce (Newcastle University)
Resemblance and identity
Karen Ingham (Swansea Metropolitan University)
A Type of Uncertainty: an interdisciplinary response to the UCL Francis Galton Archive
Abstracts
Abstracts of presentations can be downloaded here.
Final report
Download the final report
