A BRIEF HISTORY OF COMPOSITE PORTRAITS IN PHOTOGRAPHY

The composite photography technique, invented by Francis Galton in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, took its legacy from the new photography techniques that began to appear in the years immediately after the invention of photography. New perspectives affecting the photographs of that period and new image production greatly contributed to the development of this technique. The multi-layered structure that Galton used in his technique created a striking structure that lacked clarity and this technique has been used by many artists today. The composite portrait productions realized by the artists with the help of analog / digital techniques both challenge the photographic reality and combine innovation and art like the nature of composite photography. Galton's work on technique constitutes a highly developed field of photography practice through digital photography today. The traces of the multi-layered effect Galton created through photographic portraits are seen in the works like Lewis Hine's child labour, Ludwig Wittgenstein's family portrait, Wanda Wulz's cat portrait, William Wegman's family combinations, and Nancy Burson's composite portrait studies in the 1980s, Thomas Ruff's Andere Portrait, Booby Neel Adams' 'Family Tree' project, Daniel Gordon's collages, Ken Kitano's' Portraits of Our Face', and Idris Khan's' Nicholas Nixon's Brown Sisters', and these photos are important for the study. The spirit circulating in the layers of Galton's portraits has changed both aesthetically and technically through analog / digital techniques, shifting to a more unifying and compiling dimension. This article aims to investigate the effect of Francis Galton's photography technique on portrait work in the historical process. Keywords: Photography, art, portrait, composite photography