Abstract
This essay complicates standard readings of Francis Galton's composites by examining his objectives for photography in relation to his work in heredity and to his interest in mapping the body in terms of novel codes and patterns. As new additions to the visual rhetoric of photography, Galton's composite photographs reformulate, stretch, and decenter the human subject. Galton's family composites, for instance, show singular bodies retaining the traces of other bodies that share a similar heredity. These images thus represent in visual terms the individual human as the sum of past evolution and of the action of nature, which works to pressure and shape human and animal development.
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