Ghostly Spirits - continued...

In 1880, Francis Galton started to experiment with a different type of photograph, namely "transformers" that were supposed to visualize nothing but the differences between two objects. Experiments with faces showed results as disconcerting as Duchenne's manipulations of ambiguous mimicked expressions. Galton, however, was not interested in the path of the nerves, but was fascinated by changing a person's facial expression by manipulating a photograph. In 1900, he wrote: "I photographed two faces, each in two expressions, the one glum and the other smiling: I could turn the glum face into the smiling one, or vice versâ, by means of the suitable transformer; but the transformers were ghastly to look at, and did not at all give the impression of a detached smile or of a detached glumness" (quoted in Pearson, vol. II, p. 311).

reproduced from: Karl Pearson, Life and Letters of Francis Galton, vol. II, p. 312

These transformers, which were supposed to visually portray "the differences between types (or races), between individuals (...), or between an individual on different occasions" (Pearson, vol. II, p. 311), are in fact superimpositions of a positive and a negative of, for example, two different facial expressions of the same person. As in Duchenne's work, emotions and their physical expression were at the center of this photographical research. "From the psychological standpoint it ought to be of first class value in the study of the expression of the emotions. It should indicate what physical muscular changes accompany such expressions" (Pearson, vol. II, p. 316). By mapping the human body and especially by measuring the head and with the use of so - called analytical photography, Galton, like Duchenne, produced ghostly grimaces that can easily be imagined as the protagonists of a haunting or ghostly nightmare or spiritistic séance.