‘We are all alike’: Composite Portraits, CONVICTS, and the Ethics of Representation

Abstract

In the digital age, historians face a transformation in methodologies due to vast data availability. While quantitative techniques are considered essential for managing large datasets, their increased use demands heightened vigilance. Through a critique of the CONVICTS exhibition, viewed at the Hobart Penitentiary Chapel in 2019, this article illustrates why it is important to have a clear understanding of the purpose and limitations of the methodologies we engage. CONVICTS remakes Francis Galton's ‘pictorial statistics’, using contemporary methods to create composite portraits of nineteenth and twenty-first-century convicts. While Galton sought to identify the defining features of the ‘ideal criminal’, the creators of CONVICTS draw attention to the commonality and likeness of these portraits to our experience of the average person. However, presenting averaged faces as familiar and relatable can inadvertently reinforce biased judgments based on appearances. Moreover, the process of averaging faces erases individuality and fails to represent any actual convict.

Introduction

The ongoing search for insights into the identities of the convicts whose labour played a pivotal role in constructing Britain's Australian colonies has been extensively shaped by the research methods historians have employed in their investigations.¹ As Nancy Cushing observes, ‘changes in historical methods influenced ideas about whether or not convicts were essentially criminal’.² It is largely acknowledged that histories of Australia before the 1960s avoided, as far as possible, references to convicts and the impact of Australia’s penal colonies. This striking effort at erasure is generally understood in the context of a national will to suppress the memory of convictism and the ‘stain’ or ‘taint’ that endured, and preferencing in its place a narrative of ‘progress’ attained by the industrious efforts of free settlers.³ Historical sensitivities to association with convicts are understandable, Anna Clark points out, in a period when Darwinism was ascendant and Social Darwinist theories held sway:

Questions about genetics and the possible contamination of crime and poverty seeped into discussions about nationalism and race, which held that the perceived ‘looseness’ and ‘depravity’ of convict women might create whole generations of convict descendants. Questions about the heredity of convictism and criminality were influential and persuasive.⁴

More compassionate views on the plight of convicts began to form around the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In 1922, historian George Arnold Wood depicted convicts as casualties of ‘corrupt elites that promoted criminality’, while also pioneering the referencing of convict records in support of his argument.⁵ Less sympathetic, Manning Clark sampled convict indents for his 1956 article ‘The Origins of the Convicts Transported to Eastern Australia 1787–1852’ and claimed that a notable number of transported convicts were part of a criminal class and carried their ‘distinctive outlook’ to Australia.⁶ Lloyd Robson followed Clark and produced the first significant quantitative study, The Convict Settlers of Australia (1965), statistically analysing a sample of convict records to discern the characteristics of the ‘typical’ convict.⁷ Despite Robson’s seemingly objective method, his assessment was not without prejudice, and his ‘selective interpretation’ of contrary evidence ‘allowed him to conclude that convict women fit with the criminal class theory, what he called a classe dangerouse’.⁸ A year after Robson, A.G.L. Shaw’s wide-ranging study, Convicts and the Colonies (1966), also affirmed the culpability of convicts.⁹ The work of Robson and Shaw left an enduring mark on a generation of historians, remaining influential for more than two decades. As Matthew Cunneen and Malcolm Allbrook explain, collectively, these scholars contributed to the formulation of an ‘orthodox interpretation’, depicting Australia's convicts as part of ‘a professional criminal class’.¹⁰

Convict Workers, however, published in 1988, featured contributions from six economic historians, who also deployed quantitative techniques but with the aim of reshaping prevailing perceptions of convict characteristics and the functioning of the penal system.¹¹ This entailed challenging the ‘orthodox interpretation’ that viewed convicts as part of a criminal underclass.¹² By pivoting attention to considerations of labour and economy they sought ‘to resolve long-running questions of convict character and culpability’ by exposing their ‘ordinary’ standing as working-class citizens.¹³ While inciting much debate and criticism, Convict Workers is largely recognised for revitalising convict historiography and guiding it towards more nuanced reflections.¹⁴ Convict Workers also ignited debate about the relative merits of quantitative and qualitative methods – a discussion to which this paper makes a further contribution.¹⁵ For example, Raymond Evans and William Thorpe take issue with the ‘quantitative techniques deployed in Convict Workers’, critiquing both the ‘abstraction’ and ‘reification’ of ‘historical relations’ and the way in which the ‘multi-dimensional human actor is largely blotted from the landscape’.¹⁶ Humanities academics’ cautions against the application of statistical methods, seen as reductive, were encouraged by critiques such as Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man (1981). The CONVICTS exhibition is a recent reminder of the importance of discussing the purpose and limitations of historians’ research methods.¹⁷ While the reception of Convict Workers reflected rigid divisions between historians in their favoured methodologies, it has since become more common for studies of convicts and the penal system to employ a variety of methods, mixing biographical approaches with statistical analysis.¹⁸ More recently, the choice of methodologies available to historians has been transformed by the vastly increased volume of digitised sources.¹⁹ Digital tools have become a necessary accessory for the management and analysis of larger datasets, and I have written elsewhere on the need for qualitative data analysis software (QDAS) to keep pace with quantitative offerings.²⁰ At the same time, the increasing deployment of quantitative techniques and methodologies designed specifically for the analysis of large datasets should be met with increasing vigilance. In an article on digital methodologies for the study of crime and penal transportation, published in a recent special issue of the Journal of World History on ‘Digital Methods, Empire Histories’, the authors assert:

Statistical training has also disappeared from most undergraduate history teaching programs. When historians literally have big data at their finger-tips, the discipline finds itself poorly equipped to meet the challenge of the digital. Rethinking the way that history is taught at undergraduate level should thus form an important part of any wider historical digital agenda. There is no particular reason to fear a return to more intensive engagement with quantitative techniques.²¹

If statistical training is to be part of the ‘wider historical digital agenda’, then we need also to appreciate the history and biases of these methods. While quantitative techniques have, at times, been feared for these very reasons, I offer the following critique of the CONVICTS exhibition as an example of how we might avoid what Antoinette Burton has described as ‘a reinscription of empire’s ideological and technical operations’. Rather than ‘fetishize the digital as a new emancipatory horizon’, Burton warns, we should ‘view it as an extension of earlier modes of knowledge production newly instrumentalized by regimes of global capital and computation’. These new methods are ‘no more or less exempt from scrutiny and analysis than any other world historical forces we study’.²²

Burton’s concerns inform the following analysis. Commencing with a description of the CONVICTS exhibition and the Hobart Penitentiary site where it is installed, the ensuing sections will provide an overview of the history of convict photography, showing how this history intersects with various attempts, dating from the late eighteenth century, to measure and quantify the convict body. Many of these methods were deterministic in nature, and some had their origins in the development of eugenics. The concluding section will focus on alternative approaches that seek to counter the homogenising processes and essentialism inherent in many of these arguments and methodologies to critically reflect on how the CONVICTS exhibition is situated within this narrative.

CONVICTS: An exhibition at the Hobart Penitentiary

CONVICTS, described as ‘an exhibition of photographs and average faces of nineteenth and twenty-first century convicts’, is a collaboration of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Digital Panopticon, the University of Liverpool, Face Lab, Liverpool John Moores University, the University of Tasmania and National Trust Tasmania.²³ The exhibition was on display at Liverpool’s Metropolitan Cathedral in March 2018, and was later installed at the Hobart Penitentiary Chapel in July 2019. The following observations are based on a viewing of the exhibition at the Hobart Penitentiary Chapel, which serves as the backdrop for this study and accounts for the weighted focus on the history of the Australian convict portraits that have been incorporated in the display.

Built in the early 1830s, the Hobart Penitentiary Chapel represents what remains of the former Hobart Prison Barracks, where male convicts, sent to Van Diemen’s Land, were processed. It would later become the Hobart Gaol, where remaining convicts were transferred after the closure of the Port Arthur Penal Station in 1877. As the text scrolls that form part of the CONVICTS exhibit explain, a number of these remaining prisoners had their photographs taken, and some of these photos have been incorporated into the exhibition. The exhibit scrolls also claim that the ‘Hobart Penitentiary was the most important convict building in the colony’ and note its ‘capacity to accommodate over 2,000 prisoners’.²⁴ With gallows and underground tunnels, the Hobart Penitentiary is aptly described by the National Trust as a ‘bleak complex’, best illustrated by the ‘thirty-six solitary confinement cells beneath the chapel floor’.²⁵ Kristyn Harman and Angela Thomas convey the ‘sense of claustrophobia’ this space invokes – ‘We descend cautiously down to the underground tunnels and are shepherded along dark narrow walkways to see the solitary cells … The cells’ lack of ventilation suddenly becomes a reality. The air is thick with dust, eyes sting, and some tourists are coughing’.²⁶ The execution yard and gallows offer no reprieve:

… one of only two working gallows in Australia. The gallows trapdoor is quite small – less than a square metre … The guide explains that Tasmania had a healthy appetite for capital punishment, and that hundreds of people were hanged there until 1946. We’re shocked to learn that it was only in the lifetimes of one generation ago that public hanging was still practiced. We learn that the first woman to be hanged was Mary Coghlin, a victim of repeated domestic violence, executed in 1862 for defending herself and killing her husband.²⁷

What does it mean for the CONVICTS exhibition to be located on this site with such a dark and loaded history? As Harman and Thomas point out, this history goes deeper still, as ‘this bloody tale obliterates an even darker, less palatable, and less politically acceptable truth’, being ‘that of a nation forged out of the devastation of its colonial wars, wars that saw Australian Aboriginal people incorporated into the convict system alongside indigenous people from other sites of conflict across the British empire’.²⁸

The CONVICTS exhibition engages with another dark history: the notion of a ‘criminal type’ and the legacy of discrimination that it has inspired. As the text on the walls proclaim -

Despite Lombroso’s theories being widely disproved, the idea of a ‘criminal type’ has persisted into the twenty-first century. As can be seen in this exhibition, the faces of convicts are little different to the faces of anyone else we might encounter in society.²⁹

One reason for this likeness is that the creators of the exhibition have used software that ‘enables the averaging of multiple facial images, including adjustments according to relative percentages of face shape, feature dimensions, proportions’. With this software they have created the ‘average faces’ of the convicts displayed³⁰ (Figure 1). However, as the authors of the exhibition text acknowledge, the recession of distinguishing features that occurs in this averaging process is not a new discovery. British polymath Francis Galton (1822–1911), an exponent of social Darwinism and a eugenicist, first experimented with ‘composite portraiture’, overlaying multiple photographs in the hope that the resulting image might be representative of a ‘type’ of individual. Unfortunately, for Galton, the experiment yielded unimpressive results, as he observed that the composites produced average faces, lacking any distinct criminal traits. The question then arises: What purpose does this modern recreation of Galton’s findings really serve? The curators suggest that the exhibition offers an opportunity ‘to hold up a mirror to contemporary communities and cognitive bias’, but does it really achieve this, or does it reinforce a cognitive bias?³¹

The exhibition includes portraits of individual convicts as well as the portraits of averaged faces classified by gender, type of offence, and the century to which the images belong. The photographs of nineteenth-century convicts were collected from the National Archives, while the composite images of twenty-first-century offenders are created from photographs of convicted people extracted from the pages of the Liverpool Echo.³² There are no individual portraits of contemporary offenders, presumably to respect privacy and due to the difficulty of obtaining consent. Instead, a select group of historical offenders is showcased, along with details of their lives. This group of convicts never experienced the ability to consent, and nor would they have expected privacy, either in their own lifetimes or, we might assume, in the present day. As the authors of the exhibition observe, there ‘are numerous examples’ that show ‘reluctant prisoners being photographed whilst being held down by prison warders’.³³ Local police forces in England and Wales started photographing their prisoners during the 1850s and 1860s, with the practice becoming more common in the 1870s.³⁴ The exhibition scrolls explain how prisoners were initially photographed wearing hats, bonnets, and their ‘Sunday best clothes’, but in response to complaints that ‘criminals just did not appear criminal enough’ they were subsequently photographed in prison attire with shaved heads.³⁵

Figure 1. Averaged Tasmanian portraits from the CONVICTS exhibition. Image produced by Face Lab at Liverpool John Moores University in collaboration with the University of Liverpool and the University of Tasmania (permission to reproduce this image has been granted by the creators).

History of convict photography

While the reliable identification of people has always been a core administrative concern of modern policing, as Jens Jäger points out, the introduction of the first commercially available photography in 1839 was not uniformly employed for this purpose.³⁶ Police photography served different purposes over time and was initially ‘an experiment to record offenders and to gather knowledge on “dangerous” or formerly unknown types of offenders’.³⁷ It was not until the end of the nineteenth century, with the ascent of criminology, that photography became associated with more comprehensive systems of documenting and capturing individuals.³⁸ The first attempt to categorise criminals and organise their portraits in albums or card indexes, based on types of offences committed, was the ‘rogues’ gallery’. The earliest collections of this kind were in Birmingham, England in the 1850s–1860s. Then in 1858, the New York Police Department introduced its first rogues’ gallery for public viewing, allowing people to browse through mug shots to become familiar with local criminals and potentially to assist in identifying them.³⁹ More significantly, instead of serving as a practical tool for law enforcement, these galleries appear to have provided entertainment for Victorian viewers. Galleries offering this spectacle started in Germany in 1864, followed by Denmark and Russia in 1867, and other regions of England in 1870.⁴⁰ Prisons and police commonly employed commercial photographers who transferred their practice of portrait photography, with which the public was familiar, to the documentation of criminal subjects.⁴¹ It wasn’t long, however, before the sheer number of such images in various collections became unmanageable. In his role at the Paris Préfecture of Police, Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914), a statistician, responded by devising a precise identification system.⁴² This system featured standardised photographs, intricate measurements, and characteristics such as hair colour, eye colour, and skin tone. Although fingerprinting eventually replaced body measurements after 1900, Bertillon's standardised photographic method remained widely used following its adoption in the 1890s.⁴³ Bertillon’s stipulation that criminal portraits ‘had to be very different from the products of commercial photographers in style, pose, format, focusing, and exposure’ led to the evolution of designated police photographers in the same decade.⁴⁴ Nevertheless, commercial photographers continued to be engaged and ‘standard portrait photographs’ persisted ‘in police publications, on wanted posters, and for the aim of detection’.⁴⁵

South Australia was the first Australian colony to employ a prison photographer in 1867, followed by New South Wales.⁴⁶ Although it seems Tasmania did not introduce a system of organised prisoner photography until 1892, its use was first implemented in 1873.⁴⁷ A well-known collection of convict photographs from this era is the set of approximately 200 of Port Arthur’s last remaining convicts, which are thought to have been taken in 1874, prior to the closure of the penal settlement in 1877. As already mentioned, a number of these photographs are incorporated, or feature in, the CONVICTS exhibit. There is uncertainty over why the photographs were taken, and the identity of the photographer remains contested. The two main candidates are Thomas J. Nevin, a professional photographer who predominantly worked in Hobart, and Adolarius Humphrey Boyd, a Port Arthur commandant from 1871–1874 and a ‘keen amateur photographer’.⁴⁸ According to historian Julia Clark, Boyd is the most likely photographer.⁴⁹ The Port Arthur convict portraits take the form of cartes de visite (CDVs), or postcards incorporating the CDV image, as well as quarter plate print formats.⁵⁰ As Clark observes, although they occur ‘relatively late within the mugshot tradition’, the Port Arthur photographs ‘are more like the very earliest images from the 1840s, which in turn are more like Victorian portraiture’.⁵¹ In this they differ from the more forensic approach that was already a feature of colonial prison photography elsewhere.⁵²

The collection has been the subject of a number of interpretations since their production. Edwin Barnard opens his study of the Port Arthur convict photographs by noting that few ‘would be more surprised to find themselves the subject of a large, lavishly illustrated book than the men whose photographs appear in these pages’.⁵³ Yet, as Ursula Frederick points out, in the time since these photographs were taken, these portraits ‘have been replicated and circulated extensively, presented in displays and exhibitions and republished in new formats’.⁵⁴ Visual depictions of incarcerated individuals and convicts have become a significant feature of dark tourism sites, with both tourism management and associated companies frequently utilising these representations to promote their offerings.⁵⁵ Such uses raise issues of interpretation and ethical questions of commercialisation and consent. As Jenny Wise and Lesley McLean note, when ‘looking at prisoner and convict images, it is often easy to forget that these people probably did not want their photograph taken’.⁵⁶ According to Wise and McLean, the lit-up ‘enforced convict portraits’ repurposed on the Port Arthur Historic Site ‘provide the tourist with the convict’s name’ and in doing so offer ‘a modern re-naming or re-humanising’ of convicts that were largely known by ‘numbers within the system’.⁵⁷ The CONVICTS exhibit, considered here, is a further example of a new context in which these images have been positioned. Considering the historical background of prejudice, abuse, and disempowerment to which the convict body was subjected, particularly within a colonial context, it seems important to explore how the CONVICTS exhibit engages with, or speaks to, this history.

The mismeasure of the convict body

Stephen Jay Gould’s seminal work, The Mismeasure of Man, is a critique of deterministic theories, and the methods developed to support them, with the aim of reifying and ranking human intelligence. Gould finds that this history of ranking of ‘people in a single series of worthiness’ has reinforced notions that ‘oppressed and disadvantaged groups – races, classes, or sexes – are innately inferior and deserve their status’.⁵⁸ This history is also the history of the mismeasure of the convict body; whose disenfranchisement facilitated easy access, and whose marginalisation and exclusion provided a source of fascination.

Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) is perhaps one of this narrative’s better-known figures. Lombroso believed criminals were ‘evolutionary throwbacks’, and he claimed to have discovered a ‘born criminal’ type:

Germs of an ancestral past lie dormant in our heredity. In some unfortunate individuals, the past comes to life again. These people are innately driven to act as a normal ape or savage would, but such behaviour is deemed criminal in our civilized society. Fortunately, we may identify born criminals because they bear anatomical signs of their apishness. Their atavism is both physical and mental, but the physical signs, or stigmata as Lombroso called them, are decisive.⁵⁹

While Lombroso’s ideas were widely criticised and ridiculed by his contemporaries, and are not taken seriously today, he remains, as Paul Knepper points out, ‘the most influential criminologist who ever lived; the individual who perceived the study of crime as a distinct science and inspired the pursuit of criminology’.⁶⁰ Lombroso founded the Italian school of criminology and was influential in spreading the ideas of biological positivism. One reason for his enduring legacy has been the appeal of Lombroso to the literary imagination, thanks in large part to the dramatic and emotional language in his writings. His ideas were incorporated into literature, opera and popular culture, enhancing his celebrity, though ‘often at the expense of his credibility’.⁶¹ As Knepper explains, in ‘attacking his celebrity, critics in criminology established his credentials and made his theory into a school of thought’.⁶² This legacy is possibly what the authors of the CONVICTS exhibit are referring to when they declare – ‘Despite Lombroso’s theories being widely disproved, the idea of a “criminal type” has persisted into the twenty-first century’.

Predating Lombroso, the measuring of skulls, known as craniometry or craniology, for comparative anatomy and race classification, began in the late 1700s and became an established component of the study of physical anthropology in America and Europe by the early nineteenth century.⁶³ Taking skulls as their main evidentiary basis, craniologists sought to measure and quantify variations in intellectual capacity among individuals and between groups.⁶⁴ They worked largely on the presumption of a correspondence between brain size and intellectual ability.⁶⁵ However, craniologists ‘often found themselves with unusually small brains or skulls coming from renowned scientists or men of intellect, or of very large brains belonging to criminals, or unusually large female skulls’.⁶⁶ Craniology prospered between the 1830s and 1870s, but in the last quarter of the century, a combination of internal and external factors emerged that challenged its claims regarding intelligence disparities among human groups.⁶⁷ Significantly, as Michele Luchetti points out, the failure of craniological research to measure intelligence through physical means didn’t stop the belief in quantifying psychological traits from influencing the development of early intelligence testing.⁶⁸

Often associated with craniology and considered its predecessor, phrenology was first developed by German anatomist and physiologist Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828) in 1796 and gained popularity during the first half of the nineteenth century. Phrenology sought to read people’s character and sensationally focused on revealing both genius and criminal characteristics. According to phrenologists, certain areas of the brain, known as organs, were associated with specific mental traits. They believed that by studying the shape of the skull’s surface, including its bumps and indentations, they could determine the size of these areas. As the nineteenth century progressed, phrenology lost credibility as an academic discipline and was relegated to the fringes of the scientific community, although it continued to enjoy great popularity among the general public.⁶⁹ During the mid-nineteenth century, many of the performing phrenologists touring Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand had acquired their skills in the UK, Europe or America.⁷⁰ As Alexandra Roginski explains, commercial interests saw these phrenologists tailoring their presentations to meet local preferences. In Australia, this adaptation involved a focus on criminality, reflecting the convict origins of the colonies, as well as a focus on the Indigenous body. Consequently, the study of phrenology in the Australian context often centres on its role as a racial science, linked to the collection of Indigenous remains, especially skulls.⁷¹

While phrenology remains a popular subject for ridicule, its founding premise has been seen to hold enduring merit by some. Gould, for example, does not include phrenology in his study, explaining that ‘it did not reify intelligence as a single entity but sought multiple organs with the brain’ and is therefore ‘philosophically contrary to the subject of The Mismeasure of Man’:

Phrenologists celebrated the theory of richly multiple and independent intelligences … By reading each bump on the skull as a measure of ‘domesticity,’ or ‘amativeness,’ or ‘sublimity,’ or ‘causality,’ the phrenologists divided mental functioning into a rich congeries of largely independent attributes. With such a view, no single number could possibly express general human worth, and the entire concept of IQ as a unitary biological property becomes nonsense … they were philosophically on the right track – while they were absolutely just as wrong as the mismeasurers of this book in their particular theory of cranial bumps … Cranial bumps may be nonsense, but underlying cortical localization of highly specific mental processing is a reality of ever-increasing fascination in modern neurological research.⁷²

In allowing, at least, for the possibility of multiple and complex intelligences, phrenology distinguishes itself from craniology and anticipates future neurological science.

Phrenology was not seen by its advocates as deterministic. Rather, writes Fenneke Sysling, it spread the notion that one could cultivate one’s qualities positively through hard work and active training.⁷³ Sysling illustrates how popular phrenology capitalised on this sense of potentiality while introducing the general public to the idea of an average, a current preoccupation within various scientific pursuits of the time. When white middle-class consumers visited phrenologists, they learned not only to position themselves between the extremes of mental characteristics but also to ponder the implications of an average score.⁷⁴ Phrenologists had adopted the term ‘average’ from social statisticians, although they conducted little data collection of their own.⁷⁵ While they were expected to assess the size of cranial bumps, utilising knowledge gained from studying a range of heads, many took advantage of the perceived scientific accuracy of numbers and averages when filling out the charts they produced for their customers, whom they mostly flattered with above average scores.⁷⁶

Focusing on ‘the construction of normalcy’, Lennard J. Davis considers the idea of the ideal body, which predates the concept of normality, and finds that it is less constricting because there is no pressure to conform to a standard that is, by definition, impossible for a human to achieve.⁷⁷ The ideal body is a ‘mytho-poetic body’, connected to the imagery of divine beings in traditions portraying the gods, thus emphasising that this ideal, divine body, remains unattainable for humans.⁷⁸ With the introduction of the concept of normality, the average replaces the divine as an ideal, and because ‘being average’ is theoretically attainable there is often an attending pressure to conform. Contemporary life is full of norms against which we constantly rank ourselves – ‘We consider what the average person does, thinks, earns, or consumes. We rank our intelligence, our cholesterol level, our weight, height, sex drive, bodily dimensions along some conceptual line from subnormal to above-average’.⁷⁹ In Foucault’s words, ‘The judges of normality are present everywhere’.⁸⁰ The norm assumes that most people in a group should be similar in certain ways. In societies that prioritise the norm, people who differ from the average, including those with disabilities, are often viewed as deviant.⁸¹ It may be surprising to learn, as Davis observes, that the word ‘normal’ as it is currently understood – ‘constituting, conforming to, not deviating or different from, the common type or standard, regular, usual’ – entered the English language as late as 1840.⁸² Similarly, the term ‘norm’, as we know it today, emerged around 1855; while ‘normality’ and ‘normalcy’ followed in 1849 and 1857.⁸³ Tracing the history of the language used to describe these concepts reveals that the idea of ‘the norm’, in English, emerged between 1840 and 1860.⁸⁴ This focus on the norm attends a growing interest in statistics that arose in England in the 1830s, and there are strong links between statisticians and eugenicists of the nineteenth century. Francis Galton, both a statistician and the architect of composite portraiture, developed the study of eugenics. The connection between statistics and eugenics lies in the idea that a population can be normed, resulting in the division of the total population into standard and nonstandard subsets.⁸⁵ The goal of normalising the nonstandard segment, in line with eugenic concerns, Davis argues, presents a profound paradox as a statistically derived normal distribution or bell curve will always have people at the extremes who do not fit within the norm.⁸⁶

This interest in normality and divergence impacted also in photography. Galton called the method he designed for creating composite photographs ‘pictorial statistics’, and he was aware of the necessity for the data he worked with to share some commonality to avoid ‘monstrous or meaningless’ results:

No statistician dreams of grouping heterogeneous forms in the same picture. Statistical averages, and the like, are nonsensical productions unless they apply to objects that cluster towards a common centre; and composite pictures are equally monstrous or meaningless unless they are compounded of objects that have a common similarity to a central ideal type.⁸⁷

Here, the average or norm has become the ideal as Galton takes his lead from Belgian astronomer and polymath, Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874). Quetelet was an advocate for ‘a science of l’homme moyen (the average man)’ and applied ‘the statistical error concept from the study of celestial beings (mécanique céleste) to the study of human beings (mécanique sociale)’.⁸⁸ Quetelet’s original use of the Law of Error resided in his extension of what might be considered the causes or origins of error. While astronomers attributed random error to failings in human performance and the instruments used for observation and measurement, Quetelet went beyond this by proposing that error could also be ascribed to natural causes. For instance, variations in height between individuals were regarded as mere ‘imperfections of some ideal state of human nature’.⁸⁹ While Quetelet considered disparities in human attributes as manifestations of ‘random error’, Galton, supporting his interest in eugenics, interpreted these variances as outcomes of inherent and hereditary distinctions, indicative of evolutionary processes striving for human advancement.⁹⁰ Galton followed Quetelet’s ‘use of the Law of Error in establishing homogeneity in reference to type’ and, as Donna Tafreshi explains, ‘he took it a step further by using this interpretation of the law as a rule of classification’.⁹¹ For data to conform to a bell curve and avoid appearing ‘meaningless’ it needed to be representative of a type:

For Galton, to avoid arriving at ‘nonsensical productions,’ the photos needed to be sorted on likeness before a composition could be made. A meaningful inference was looking for the homogeneous facts that were supposed to be grouped in ‘natural classes.’ This homogeneity of a class, the ‘common similarity to a central ideal type’ could be seen only by the eye that had familiarized itself with the material.⁹²

Galton found it necessary to presume the existence of natural classes in the subjects he studied, believing that groups such as criminals, those suffering from tuberculosis, and Jews each fell within a natural classification discernible to the habituated observer.⁹³ The familiarised eye that sorted the photographs according to their visual ‘likenesses’ is assumed, by Galton, ‘to be unbiased’.⁹⁴

Galton’s first experiments with composite portraits were an attempt to capture the ‘physical characteristics and features’ of the ‘ideal criminal’, to whose character he attributes the following traits – ‘His conscience is almost deficient, his instincts are vicious, and his power of self-control is very weak’.⁹⁵ Working with a collection of thousands of photographs furnished by the director general of prisons in England, Galton requested that the photographs be supplied in three sets, classified according to the type of crime committed – ‘The first group included murder, manslaughter, and burglary; the second group included felony and forgery; and the third group referred to sexual crimes’.⁹⁶ Familiarising himself with the collections, Galton claims to have identified ‘certain natural classes’ with ‘exceedingly well marked’ features.⁹⁷ However, opposing Galton’s expectations, it became evident that ‘the special expressions of different criminals do not reinforce one another in the composite, but disappear’:

the features of the composites are much better looking than those of the components. The special villainous irregularities in the latter have disappeared and the common humanity that underlies them has prevailed. They represent, not the criminal, but the man who is liable to fall into crime. All composites are better looking than their components, because the averaged portrait of many persons is free from the irregularities that variously blemish the looks of each of them.⁹⁸

The introduction of computers and digital technology has seen modern face-averaging techniques develop, and a number of studies have confirmed Galton’s findings. Averaged or typical faces have repeatedly been shown to coincide with perceptions of attractiveness and trustworthiness.⁹⁹ As Isabelle Bülthoff and Mintao Zhao explain, when ‘average faces are created with an increasing number of faces, they become computationally more similar to each other and more similar to the hypothetical face norm’.¹⁰⁰ To summarise, in Galton’s words, ‘All that is common to the group remains; all that is individual disappears’.¹⁰¹

This lack of representation of diversity is a problem that Matthew Cunneen has identified as inherent within those convict studies that engage with prosopography, taking a quantitative ‘big data’ approach to administrative records. Reflecting on the 800 to 1000 people of colour who were transported to Australia between 1788–1851, Cunneen highlights how, due to their relatively small number, their distinct circumstances and experiences are effectively lost, or sharply contrast with ‘more conventional understandings of Australia’s convicts’ when they are included in databases and big data studies.¹⁰² It is unknown whether any portraits of convicts of colour were included in the averaged faces of the CONVICTS exhibit. If they were, it may be assumed that any trace of their physical uniqueness would be vanished in a similar way. It might then be asked, who among the convict body is actually being represented in the averaged faces of the CONVICTS exhibit? Presumably the answer must be a resounding ‘no one’, for in ‘advocating for the study of the average man, Quetelet was, indeed, promoting the study of no one’.¹⁰³ An averaged face is an averaged face. It represents no individual. It may represent a population, but this is problematic, for the reasons noted above and the inevitable exclusion of those at the extremes of the bell curve. Furthermore, the exhibition’s declaration that ‘the faces of the convicts are little different to the faces of anyone else we might encounter in society’ reinforces the idea that familiarity and similarity are positive traits, inspiring empathy and trust. The desired response seems to be based on the notion that we can relate to and accept these convicts because, ultimately, they resemble us. At the same time, this implies that what is different should inspire our distrust. Given this binary, it is unclear how the exhibit works to diminish any persistent notion of a ‘criminal type’ while the ‘mirror’ it claims to hold ‘to contemporary communities and cognitive bias’ appears to reinforce, rather than mitigate, prejudice based on physical appearance.¹⁰⁴

Heterology

Drawing on the work of Karl Popper, who identified the essentialist philosophies of Plato and Hegel as the ‘enemies’ of the ‘open society’, Boumans cautions against essentialism within current research trends:

From Galton’s time to our days of machine learning, clustering of data is still conceived that we have ‘hit’ at some true natural characteristics of the social group we are investigating. This is essentialism in statistics. We assume that statistically determined characteristics are ‘natural,’ ‘typical,’ or ‘generic,’ and thus reveal a real essence. The higher the degree of clustering, the stronger is this faith … Monsters are items that appear at some distance from the central cluster.¹⁰⁵

Monsters, in this context, are typically considered ‘outliers’ and threaten the order defined by the central cluster, representing the norm. Instead of dismissing outliers as threats to order, Boumans advocates embracing them, ‘I appeal to be open to monsters and welcome them, they are the possibilities for growth and development’.¹⁰⁶ In alignment with Boumans’ plea to remain open to possibilities, and in contrast to Galton, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) viewed the composite portrait as ‘a picture of probabilities’, containing multiple outcomes.¹⁰⁷ He was most interested in ‘the disparate parts found at the outer edges of the image and in the blur’.¹⁰⁸ In this way, as Lila Lee-Morrison explains, ‘Wittgenstein voiced a counter-discourse to the meaning of Galton’s composites, rejecting the reductive procedure of abstraction’ and naming a ‘craving for generality’ and ‘a contempt for particulars’ as the problems hindering a more considered investigation.¹⁰⁹ This ‘continuous seeing’ or will to ‘keep on seeing the same’ is referred to by Wittgenstein as ‘aspect blindness’.¹¹⁰ Wittgenstein’s concern for the ‘particulars’ that are excluded from consideration in the pursuit of the homogeneous is amplified in the work of Georges Bataille (1897–1962), who proposed a ‘science of the heterogeneous’ with the aim of illuminating ‘monsters’ and the possibilities they speak.¹¹¹

Through the work of Jean Wahl and Alexandre Kojève, who each take a considerably different approach in their interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, we see how French thought in the first half of the twentieth century became increasingly preoccupied with the relationship between reason and its other.¹¹² What arises from both Wahl and Kojève’s readings of Hegel is an express concern for what is perceived as the essentially homogenising effect of a form of reason that seeks to be all-inclusive. It is in this context that Bataille’s study of what he calls ‘heterology’ is best understood.¹¹³ Bataille’s interest in the ‘heterogeneous’, that which cannot be assimilated, is presented as the necessary counterpart to the homogeneity and coherence of Hegel’s System.

Addressing Bataille, who is always ‘searching for a radical difference’, Mark C. Taylor writes,

The ‘homogeneity of the world,’ which is the dream of Western philosophy, science, and technology, is, for Bataille, a nightmare. Confronted with systems – philosophical, scientific, religious, social, cultural, political, and economic – that attempt to master every other by incorporating, assimilating, or digesting all differences, Bataille attempts to expose an altarity that can never be domesticated.¹¹⁴

Responding to the question – ‘What remains after the System digests everything?’ – Bataille determines to examine ‘the irreducible waste products’ of ‘various systematic operations’.¹¹⁵ Thus Bataille develops the study of what he calls heterology, or sometimes scatology or base materialism. As Allan Stoekl explains, invariably, certain phenomena elude assimilation ‘to any scientific understanding’, being, by definition, ‘heterogeneous’: ‘they are the terms that underlie the scientific method, Bataille argues (in a proto-deconstructive mode), but whose exclusion is necessary for that system to constitute itself in its homogeneity, its coherence’.¹¹⁶ In Taylor’s words, the ‘excrement of the System constitutes “the blind spot” of Hegelianism’.¹¹⁷ As illustrated in the observations of Boumans and Cunneen noted above, this ‘blind spot’, or what Wittgenstein called ‘aspect blindness’, persists in some current research trends and sometimes in their application to convict data.

Bruce Baugh describes a central recognition that emerges from the French reception of Hegel, explaining, ‘a reason that seeks to be all-inclusive falsifies reality by suppressing or repressing its “other”, much as the police state achieves a certain homogeneity by repressing dissidence’.¹¹⁸ This insight is particularly relevant when considering a frequently cited incident at the Cascades female factory in Hobart in 1842. A significant disruption, ‘achieved entirely by noise’, was enacted by approximately 150 women in the crime class who had become frustrated with being confined to ‘day rooms’ while repair work was carried out in the yards. They had expressed their discontent by singing, dancing, shouting, clapping, and stamping their feet.¹¹⁹ Attempts by the matron and superintendent to quiet them and identify ringleaders were met with defiance and a striking show of solidarity in the form of a chant in which they repeatedly declared ‘We are all alike. We are all alike’.¹²⁰ This choice of defence and resistance is particularly interesting as it implies a keen intuitive sense of both the limits and possibilities of their situation. They are the repressed ‘other’ of colonial society, held in a system designed to regulate their behaviour. In this context, ‘We are all alike’ acts as a taunt to the authorities who wish to see them made ‘all alike’. In the same moment, at the height of their defiance, these women manage to exceed the confines of the system in which they are held and reveal themselves as the outliers of that system, who will not be assimilated or domesticated. In claiming their homogeneity, ‘we are all alike’, they effectively expose and celebrate their heterogeneity. They are only alike in that they are uncontrollable, unpredictable, and largely unknowable. They are the monsters. Unfortunately, such triumphs are only momentary, for eventually the police arrive and overpower them. Nonetheless, it is hard to imagine a more perceptive chant to reclaim their visibility and individuality.

‘We are all alike’ might also serve as a descriptive caption for the averaged portraits on display in the CONVICTS exhibition. However, in contrast to the use of this phrase by the convict women in their disruption of the system enforced at the Cascades factory, there is no transgressive moment to be found in the averaged portraits displayed at the Hobart Penitentiary. Instead, these portraits reinforce and echo the system they represent. This is perhaps less surprising when considered, as has been argued here, in the context of the history of convict portraiture and methods used to measure and define the convict body. The creators of the CONVICTS exhibition intentionally deploy a contemporary procedure to recreate a current display of Galton’s ‘pictorial statistics’. The question considered in this paper has been why and to what effect? Galton failed to reveal, through his composite portraits, what he perceived as the features of the ‘ideal criminal’, finding instead that the process created more regular and less distinct faces, making it easier for him to see in them a ‘common humanity’.

This idea of a ‘common humanity’ is taken up by the creators of the CONVICTS exhibition who wish to emphasise how ‘the faces of convicts are little different to the faces of anyone else we might encounter in society’. In taking Galton’s failure as the point of achievement, the exhibition capitalises on contemporary sensibilities and effectively presents convicts as ‘ideal victims’ in contrast to Galton’s ‘ideal criminal’. Playing on the rogues’ gallery that ‘functioned on the basis of a re-enactment of a face-to-face encounter between witness/victim and suspect/offender’, the CONVICTS exhibition places the viewer in the position of witness to offender/victim.¹²¹ This has been shown in the preceding discussion to be problematic on several levels. The presentation of averaged faces as familiar and relatable, and by extension worthy of empathy, reinforces bias based on appearance in the same way as Lombroso’s depiction of a ‘criminal type’. The emphasis may be reversed but, in both instances, what appears familiar and normal is positively recommended, inferring that what appears different or divergent is not. Further to this, there is the problem that averaged faces are not actually representative of any convict. Rather, they belong to the category of what Boumans calls ‘essentialism in statistics’, where statistically determined characteristics are mistakenly assumed to be ‘natural’, ‘typical’, or ‘generic’, and therefore ‘reveal a real essence’. Historically, this method of research developed as part of a narrative to justify the status of various oppressed and disadvantaged groups. While all ‘methodologies have their appropriate domains of application’, as Cunneen points out, they also carry ‘limitations on the kinds of questions that can be effectively pursued’. For this reason, writes Cunneen, ‘conceptual clarity’ is key to their critical evaluation.¹²²

Conceptual clarity is where the CONVICTS exhibition arguably flounders, failing to acknowledge the homogenising process of its methods and the ways in which they vanish individuality and difference. In this, the averaged portraits echo the repression of the convict system itself – a point brutally amplified by the location in which they are shown. Reflecting a system that fails to recognise the difference between a murderer and a victim of domestic violence, the CONVICTS exhibition, in conversation with the history of the site on which it is displayed, might be considered a second hanging for the likes of Mary Coghlin, the first woman to be hanged at the Penitentiary gallows.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the article reviewers and the AHS editors for their time and generous feedback.

No conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Nancy Cushing, A History of Crime in Australia: Australian Underworlds (Oxon: Routledge, 2023), 45.

2 Ibid., 46.

3 Anna Clark, Making Australian History (Sydney: Vintage, 2022), 59.

4 Ibid., 64.

5 G.A. Wood, ‘Convicts’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 8, no. 4 (1922): 177–208; Matthew Cunneen and Malcolm Allbrook, ‘Understanding Convict Lives: A Historiographical and Methodological Reassessment’, Australian Journal of Biography and History 7 (2023): 3–21, 6–7.

6 Cushing, 49.

7 L.L. Robson, The Convict Settlers of Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1965); Cunneen and Allbrook, 7.

8 Cushing, 50.

9 A.G.L. Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies: A Study of Penal Transportation from Great Britain and Ireland to Australia and other parts of the British Empire (London: Faber and Faber, 1966).

10 Cunneen and Allbrook, 8.

11 Stephen Nicholas, ed., Convict Workers: Reinterpreting Australia’s Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Cunneen and Allbrook, 10.

12 Nicholas; Cunneen and Allbrook, 10.

13 David Andrew Roberts, ‘The “Knotted Hands That Set Us High”: Labour History and the Study of Convict Australia’, Labour History 100 (May 2011): 33–50, 42.

14 Ibid., 43.

15 Ibid., 42; Cunneen and Allbrook, 10.

16 Raymond Evans and William Thorpe, ‘Historical Reconsiderations IX: Power, Punishment and Penal Labour: Convict Workers and Moreton Bay’, Australian Historical Studies 25, no. 98 (1992): 90–111, 94, 98.

17 Hobart Penitentiary Exhibit, University of Tasmania Special and Rare Collections AU TAS UTAS SPARC 2019/1-Uni (2019) https://sparc.utas.edu.au/index.php/hobart-penitentiary-exhibit (accessed 15 September 2023).

18 Cunneen and Allbrook, 12.

19 Mike Jones and Alana Piper, ‘Digital History: State of the Field Review Essay’, Australian Historical Studies (2023): 1–26.

20 Kim Shaw, ‘Will Qualitative Data Analysis Software (QDAS) Keep Apace of Bigger Data Trends? Van Diemen’s Land Convicts Bring NVivo to Trial’, Eras Journal 23 (2021): 20–36.

21 Barry Godfrey, Caroline Homer, Kris Inwood, Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Rebecca Reed*, and Richard Tuffin, ‘Crime, Penal Transportation, and Digital Methodologies’, Journal of World History 32, no. 2 (2021): 241–60, 257 (*correct spelling should be ‘Read’, not ‘Reed’ as published).

22 Antoinette Burton, ‘Digital Methods + Empire Histories = New, Old, and Emerging Practices’, Journal of World History 32, no. 2 (2021): 191–97, 193.

23 Hobart Penitentiary Exhibit, University of Tasmania Special and Rare Collections.

24 Ibid.

25 Hobart Convict Penitentiary Chapel, National Trust Tasmania (2023), https://www.nationaltrust.org.au/places/penitentiary/ (accessed 30 August 2023),

26 Kristyn Harman and Angela Thomas, ‘Transporting Visitors into Tasmania’s Convict Past’, in Tourism in Tasmania, eds Can Seng Ooi and Anne Hardy (Hobart: Forty South Publishing, 2019), 125–36, 134.

27 Ibid., 134–35.

28 Ibid., 136.

29 Hobart Penitentiary Exhibit, University of Tasmania Special and Rare Collections.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid.

32 ‘Exhibition of Composite Images Reveals Faces of 19th and 21st Century Crime’, University of Liverpool, published 6 March 2018, https://news.liverpool.ac.uk/2018/03/06/exhibition-composite-images-reveals-faces-19th-21st-century-crime/ (accessed 30 August 2023).

33 Hobart Penitentiary Exhibit, University of Tasmania Special and Rare Collections.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid.

36 Jens Jäger, ‘Photography: A Means of Surveillance? Judicial Photography, 1850 to 1900’, Crime, History & Societies 5, no. 1 (2001): 27–51.

37 Ibid., 46.

38 Ibid., 48.

39 Julia Clark, ‘“Rendering Our Criminal Procedure More Perfect”: 19th-Century Forensic Photography at Home and Abroad’, Tasmanian Historical Studies 16 (2011): 25–36, 29.

40 Ibid.

41 Jäger, 40.

42 J. Clark, ‘Rendering Our Criminal Procedure’, 29.

43 Ibid., 30.

44 Jäger, 44.

45 Ibid.

46 J. Clark, ‘Rendering Our Criminal Procedure’, 30.

47 Ibid.

48 Edwin Barnard, Exiled: The Port Arthur Convict Photographs (Canberra: National Library Australia, 2010), 15.

49 Julia Clark, ‘A Question of Attribution: Port Arthur's Convict Portraits’, Journal of Australian Colonial History 12 (2010): 77–96.

50 J. Clark, ‘Rendering Our Criminal Procedure’, 30.

51 Ibid., 36.

52 J. Clark, ‘A Question of Attribution’, 92.

53 Barnard, 7.

54 Ursula K. Frederick, ‘The Bad and the Beautiful: An Artist’s Encounter with the Image of Port Arthur, Tasmania’, Landscape Research 46, no. 3 (2021): 341–61, 343–44.

55 Jenny Wise and Lesley McLean, ‘“Pack of Thieves?”: The Visual Representation of Prisoners and Convicts in Dark Tourist Sites’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Incarceration in Popular Culture, eds Marcus Harmes, Meredith Harmes, and Barbara Harmes (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 555–73, 557.

56 Ibid., 562.

57 Jenny Wise and Lesley McLean, ‘The Separate Prison at Port Arthur: Transforming a Convict Site into a Memorial Museum with Digital Technology’, in The Memorial Museum in the Digital Age, ed. Victoria Grace Walden (Brighton, UK: REFRAME Books, 2022), 89–120, 109.

58 Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (revised and expanded) (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996), 57.

59 Ibid., 153.

60 Paul Knepper, ‘Laughing at Lombroso: Positivism and Criminal Anthropology in Historical Perspective’, in The Handbook of the History and Philosophy of Criminology, ed. Ruth Ann Triplett (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018), 51–66, 51.

61 Ibid., 55.

62 Ibid., 52.

63 Michele Luchetti, ‘The Quantification of Intelligence in Nineteenth–Century Craniology: An Epistemology of Measurement Perspective’, European Journal for Philosophy of Science 12, no. 4 (2022): Article 56.

64 Ibid.

65 Ibid.

66 Ibid.

67 Ibid.

68 Ibid.

69 Fenneke Sysling, ‘Phrenology and the Average Person, 1840–1940’, History of the Human Sciences 34, no. 2 (2021): 27–45, 27.

70 Alexandra Roginski, Science and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Tasman World: Popular Phrenology in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 15.

71 Ibid.

72 Gould 22, 57.

73 Sysling, 30.

74 Ibid., 39.

75 Ibid., 39–40.

76 Ibid., 40.

77 Lennard J. Davis, ed., The Disability Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2016), 1, 2.

78 Ibid., 2.

79 Ibid., 1.

80 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 304.

81 Davis, 3.

82 Ibid., 1.

83 Ibid., 2.

84 Ibid.

85 Ibid., 3.

86 Ibid.

87 Francis Galton, ‘Generic Images’, The Nineteenth Century and After: A Monthly Review 6, no. 29 (1879): 157–69, 162, 160–61; Marcel Boumans, ‘Pictorial Statistics’, History of Political Economy 53, no. S1 (2021): 207–26, 207.

88 Donna Tafreshi, ‘Adolphe Quetelet and the Legacy of the “Average Man” in Psychology’, History of Psychology 25, no. 1 (2022): 34–55, 34.

89 Ibid., 37–38.

90 Ibid., 46.

91 Ibid., 48.

92 Boumans, ‘Pictorial Statistics’, 223.

93 Ibid.

94 Ibid., 221.

95 Ibid., 211.

96 Ibid., 212.

97 Ibid.

98 Francis Galton, ‘Composite Portraits, Made by Combining Those of Many Different Persons into a Single Resultant Figure’, The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 8 (1879): 132–44, 135; Boumans, ‘Pictorial Statistics’, 19.

99 See, for example, Judith H. Langlois and Lori A. Roggman, ‘Attractive Faces Are Only Average’, Psychological Science 1, no. 2 (1990): 115–21; Carmel Sofer et al., ‘What Is Typical Is Good: The Influence of Face Typicality on Perceived Trustworthiness’, Psychological Science 26, no. 1 (2015): 39–47; Chaitanya K. Ryali et al., ‘From Likely to Likable: The Role of Statistical Typicality in Human Social Assessment of Faces’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117, no. 47 (2020): 29371–80.

100 Isabelle Bülthoff and Mintao Zhao, ‘Average Faces: How Does the Averaging Process Change Faces Physically and Perceptually?’, Cognition 216 (2021): 104867.

101 Galton, ‘Generic Images’, 161.

102 Matthew Cunneen, ‘Fragmented Lives, Fragmentary Archives: Collective Biography in Australian Convict History’, Australian Journal of Biography and History, no. 7 (2023): 75–93, 78.

103 Tafreshi, 53.

104 The notion of holding ‘up a mirror to contemporary communities and cognitive bias’ appears to be a rewording of a similar passage in an article on another Face Lab exhibition that explicitly seeks to explore questions of cognitive bias in the public response to a collection of contemporary averaged faces. It is, undoubtedly, appropriate in this context. What is argued here is that its application/extension to the CONVICTS exhibit is not supported or appropriate. See Caroline Wilkinson, Stenton Mackenzie, and Kathryn Smith, ‘Faces of Merseyside: Exploring Cognitive Bias Through Facial Averages’, Leonardo 53, no. 5 (2020): 498–503.

105 Marcel Boumans, ‘Historicism and its Monsters’, Inaugural Address (2021), https://dspace.library.uu.nl/ (accessed 10 August 2023).

106 Ibid.

107 Lila Lee-Morrison, ‘A Portrait of Facial Recognition: Tracing a History of a Statistical Way of Seeing’, Philosophy of Photography 9, no. 2 (2018): 107–30, 121.

108 Ibid., 120.

109 Ibid.

110 Ibid., 122.

111 Georges Bataille, ‘Definition of Heterology’, Theory, Culture & Society 35, no. 4–5 (2018): 29–40.

112 Bruce Baugh, French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 2003).

113 Georges Bataille, ‘The Use-Value of D.A.F. De Sade (an Open Letter to My Current Comrades)’, in The Bataille Reader, eds Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 147–159; Georges Bataille, ‘Letter to X, Lecturer on Hegel’, in The College of Sociology (1937–39), ed. Denis Hollier (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 89–93.

114 Mark C. Taylor, Altarity (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 121 (‘altarity’ is derived from the words ‘altar’ and ‘alterity’).

115 Ibid., 121–22.

116 Allan Stoekl, Bataille's Peak: Energy, Religion and Postsustainability (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 19.

117 Taylor, 122.

118 Baugh, 12.

119 Tasmanian Archives, CSO22/1/50; Babette Smith, Defiant Voices: How Australia’s Female Convicts Challenged Authority (Canberra: National Library of Australia Publishing, 2021), 206.

120 Tasmanian Archives, CSO22/1/50; Smith, Defiant Voices, 206.

121 Jäger, 10–11.

122 Cunneen, 76.