Arthur Batut: pioneer of aerial and composite photography

From the old ATU site:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_heQ6gYSoB0J:acrosstheuniverse.forumotion.com/t4139-arthur-batut-pioneer-of-aerial-and-composite-photography+Acrosstheuniverse+%2B+arthur+batut+pioneer+aerial+composite+photography&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk&source=www.google.co.uk

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Precautionary replication of the material above before the link to the old ATU cache expires:

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Lambruguiere, 1889. Camera attached to kite.

The camera was held close to the kite, and inside the camera was an altimeter that could record the altitude of the kite when the picture was taken which made scaling the image possible. The timing was determined by a slow burning fuse that was lit when when kite was launched, after the picture was taken a white flag was dropped and the kite was reeled in.

Composite family photo of Batut, his wife, his mother-in-law and his two sons.

Composite photo of the women of Vich, Spain.

Composite photo of 50 inhabitants of Labruguiere.

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None of the (apparent) 'subjects' of the portraits above actually existed. The final images were created by photographing a number of people for a fraction of a second and repeating the process over and over.

Portraits of non-existent subjects, if you like.

Arthur Askey wrote: All these cut'n'paste jobs from the Grauniad will bring this forum down. Oh yeah. Fascinating stuff as ever.

Composite family photo of Batut, his wife, his mother-in-law and his two sons.

Not The Guardian this time, felix.

I'd never heard of Arthur Batut until I saw this photograph on the front cover of my new Penguin Classics edition of The Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde.

Neatly as it fits this famous tale, it's an even better illustration of Stevenson's accompanying vampire story 'Olalla', a Gothic fantasy of tainted bloodlines in a noble Spanish house.

Batut's experiments in composite photography were influenced by the work of Sir Francis Galton, Victorian polymath and half cousin to Charles Darwin, whose theories about eugenics and criminal types appear pretty suspect to 21st century sensibilities.

Wiki:

Galton devised a technique called composite photography, described in detail in Inquiries in human faculty and its development, which he believed could be used to identify types by appearance. He hoped his technique would aid medical diagnosis, and even criminology through the identification of typical criminal faces. However, he was forced to conclude after exhaustive experimentation that such types were not attainable in practice.

One of Galton's photographic attempts to identify a 'criminal type'. As scientific as Phrenology, really.

Galton photo of "Sick types".

It's not difficult to see where Victorian imperialist ideas were leading Galton.

Wiki (again):

Galton wrote a controversial letter to the Times titled 'Africa for the Chinese', where he argued that the Chinese, as a race capable of high civilization and (in his opinion) only temporarily stunted by the recent failures of Chinese dynasties, should be encouraged to immigrate to Africa and displace the supposedly inferior aboriginal blacks.

When Churchill condemned the "perverted science" of the Nazis, was he aware that the British Empire had knighted a pioneer in this field?