Eugenics and photography in Britain, the USA and Australia 1870–1940

Abstract

This essay traces the main ways in which photography was taken up and used by supporters of the eugenics movement, from the time that Darwin's cousin, the British polymath Francis Galton, first used it to demonstrate the role played by heredity in human intelligence, to the early 1940s, when the eugenics movement lost much of its appeal. It is argued that Galton's composite photographs of the socially “fit” and “unfit” members of British society only broadly determined the pattern for how American and Australian eugenicists deployed photography, and that each country's differing social tensions caused them to evolve their own diverse set of photographic practices aimed at promulgating the eu..