Curatorial description (Accessed: 16 December 2015)
The idea that photography could be used as a tool both to understand and to manipulate social behaviour was not new. Late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century photographic experiments were intended to improve efficiency in the labour force, or provide proof of aberrant "types." In 1877, Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin's, combined photographic negatives of individuals in an attempt to develop an array of societal types. Here, Lewis Hine sandwiched negatives together in the hope of creating a generic portrait of a female child labourer. Only a small number of his composites exist; two are in the collection of the National Gallery.
