Photographic Enlargements and Ethical Looking: Fingerprints from Hooghly

Abstract

Photographic Enlargements and Ethical Looking:Fingerprints from Hooghly Mira Rai Waits (bio) The "hooghly Fingerprint Copies" are photographic enlargements of the fingerprints of Indian subjects developed on bromide paper, a popular commercial photography paper invented in the 1880s.1 Made by Francis Galton (the so-called father of eugenics2) from fingerprint specimens sent to him by William Herschel (a British colonial administrator stationed in India), they are a noteworthy feature of the digital collections of University College London. In his anthropometric laboratory at the South Kensington Museum in London, Galton enlarged fingerprints of the same people, prints taken first in 1878 and then again in 1892. During development, he placed the two prints side by side to show how fingerprints did not change over time. To access digital copies of these prints today, one need only click on [End Page 36] the PDF icon on the UCL "Hooghly Fingerprint Copies" reference web page and a document with pages of black and white photographic enlargements is generated. While the sheer volume of prints in the PDF can be visually overwhelming, the digitization of these prints also masks the colonial history of the prints' production by transforming bodies into easily accessible files. These enlarged prints appear more beautiful to me the longer I stare at them. Galton also admired the beauty captured by bodily prints, although his reasons for admiration had little to do with their aesthetic value and more to do with what they could potentially prove about human heredity. In his 1888 lecture at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, he noted that "Perhaps the most beautiful and characteristic of all superficial marks are the small furrows with the intervening ridges and their pores that are disposed in a singularly complex yet even order on the under surfaces of the hands and the feet" ("Personal Identification" 187). Galton's interest in the "complex yet even order" of fingerprints was spurred by his hypothesis that there were observable hereditary commonalities within the human population. He took a special interest in research subjects that would enable him to prove the existence of criminal and racial "types," speculating that the discovery of commonalities would ultimately contribute to the human population's improvement. To facilitate the visualization of the "type," Galton experimented with a variety of mediums. Prior to fingerprinting, he developed composite photography, a practice wherein exposures of different people were combined on a single photographic plate. He also drew contour lines based on facial profiles and explored Bertillonage, a classification system developed by French police officer Alphonse Bertillon in 1882 (Gillham ch. 17).3 While Galton ultimately failed to put fingerprinting to use as a tool for "improving" the human population, he was able to demonstrate that fingerprints were unique markers of identity that did not substantially change over time. He also developed a classificatory system that continues to form the basis for biometric classification within criminal justice systems around the world (Cole 99–100). To develop his fingerprinting system, Galton returned to photography, praising the medium for its accuracy and the ease of enlarging prints, which he argued facilitated the deciphering of fingerprint patterns (Galton, Finger Prints 111). When I look at the prints, I too am moved to praise by the patterns one can observe in the abstract loops and whorls, which, through photographic enlargement, look less like parts of the human body and more like the aerial photographs of Robert Smithson's earthwork Spiral Jetty (1970). Such visual ambiguity is demonstrative of photography's power to distort the scale of its subjects, but it also underlies a disturbing feature of biometrics that has conditioned our engagement with its imagery since the science was first cultivated. In translating the body into an abstraction, the enlarged photograph prompts us to lose sight of the people whose bodily traces are recorded on the photograph's surface. [End Page 37] I have spent several years pondering if it is possible to acknowledge the people fingerprinted in India who were the subjects of Galton's research and whether we can adequately address the historical circumstances that engendered the fingerprints' making. The notes on the reverse side of Galton's photographic enlargements are...