Harvard’s Composite “Class” Pictures

Abstract

At first glance, John L. Lovell’s Harvard class portraits appear to represent one man and one woman. But instead, these composite photographs personify the “average” appearance of the entire classes of 1887 at Harvard University and the “Annex,” or Boston’s Protestant Brahmin elite. Composite photographs such as these, which held scientific gravity as part of the Harvard-entrenched Positive Eugenics movement, were composed of an incomplete data set. Thus, they offer a revised view of Allan Sekula’s ideas about composite photography’s requisite statistical potency. In addition, the Harvard composites call for a more nuanced articulation of their indexical functions, within the context of late nineteenth-century trends in the production of visual statistics and knowledge.