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The Victorian era, obsessed with moral restraint and sexual moderation, led to a fascination for the classification of all that was considered as alien to these strict moral codes. There was a strong interest among Galton’s contemporaries in degeneracy, which was widely perceived as a national threat. It was blamed by commentators of the time for the cause and result of a host of issues, from alcoholism or pollution to working classes revolution (Arata, 1996). These individual afflictions affected the collective life of the nation, which encouraged scientists and sociologists to dedicate themselves to defining who these degenerates were, in order to recognise them and remove them from the rest of society, which they supposedly endangered. Criminals were seen at the time as people who were unable to control themselves, a perfect counterexample of the restraint advocated for the people, and became another sign of a crumbling society, invaded by degeneracy.  

Sociologists and scientists held different views on the subject of the origins of crime: where a criminal was a product of the decaying world they lived in in sociology, scientists started to develop the idea that they were born criminal, with inherited traits that could be recognised through physiological features. By making crime a genetic characteristic, it sentenced both the criminal and their family. Galton, drawing on Social Darwinism, aimed to prove that the deviancy of criminality was the characteristic of a weaker human race. He had begun these studies in 1877, after being invited by Her Majesty’s director of prisons to determine whether types of criminality could be linked back to physical features (Fineman, 2012). Galton indeed believed that physical appearance could be classified and used to define a person’s potential for psychological conditions and crime. It is with this theory in mind that he devised the technique of composite portraits, as a visual tool to categorise people into “human types.” 

In order to prove the existence of a “weaker type,” Galton wished to use the apparent accuracy, objectivity and scientific repeatability which photography appeared to offer compared to other forms of observation. The idea behind composite portraiture is quite simple: the photographer has to use the same photographic plate for all the exposures, making sure that each portrait is superimposed onto the next one, resulting into a single portrait made up of several individual ones. When working with photographs already produced, Galton set a camera upon the arranged photographs, held together with pins on top of each other, and took turns in exposure in front of the camera to recreate this superimposition (Bernie et al. 2013). The composite portraits could be used to show the similarities between members of the same family or attempt to see the true likeness of a person through different representations, like this composite portrait of Napoleon. 

Moreover, Galton was particularly concerned by the fertility of the lower, "deviant” classes, and believed them to be an obstacle to progress and evolution. The goal was thus not only to “obtain pictorial average” (Galton, 1877) of the “criminal class,” but to use these photographs as scientific proof to promote his eugenics agenda.  

These specific portraits were made with original images from the Home Office, from plates of criminals accused of murder and manslaughter, and one convicted of larceny (Berni et al. 2013). The criminals cannot be identified, which was Galton’s goal in order to remove each person from his context, and focus solely on physiognomic features.   

By manipulating photographs in such a way, any two portraits of people will eventually merge into a singular figure, ending up resembling no one in particular, and even losing human characteristics. Galton’s work resulted in a reification of the other (de Lorenzo, 2015), which encouraged thinking of the lower social classes, the original individual components of the composite photographs, as a lower human class.

This othering of criminals and of the lower class they came from made eugenicists cast them aside from society and labelling them as mentally deficient. As a danger to society, their ‘evils’ had to be stopped, which led some countries to drastic measures such as eugenics sterilization programs. The first one of this sort took place in the state of Indiana (US), where a portion of the population of Jeffersonville’s prison was sterilized in 1907 (Samson, 2013). Several programs followed suit in North America, and show the atrocious consequences of eugenics theories.