This article aims to demonstrate the impact that Johann Caspar Lavater's system of reading the face (a system called physiognomy) had on the development of portrait photography in nineteenth century Britain. Lavater published his major work on physiognomy in the 18th century but because it was aimed at discerning moral character, many of its elements were taken up and used by those nineteenth-century race scientists and state functionaries who, concerned about the nation's health, used photography to identify Britain's so-called degenerate classes. Focused on in particular are the key ideas and visual conventions that this style of portraiture took from Lavater - conventions that categorised people into group or types. A second major aim of the article is to demonstrate the continuing role pathognomy played in the development of the photographic portraits used to portray the nation's respectable classes. This was a style in which the emphasis was placed not on the physiognomic features of the face, but on those more elusive qualities that derive from the muscle movements associated with feeling and expression. Here, the focus was on individuality and the discerning people's personalities, the very features that made people stand out from the group or crowd. It is further argued that just as the style used to portray the degenerate classes owed much to Lavater's ideas, the style of photography used for Britain's respectable classes owed much to the champions of pathognomy, a body of writers that included some of Lavater's more outspoken contemporaries.
Anne Maxwell (Wed,) studied this question.