Microhistory of composite portraits: The case of Arthur Batut (1846-1918)

Abstract

 This paper investigates the case of Arthur Batut, a 19th century French photographer from Labruguiere (Tarn), who employed a different perspective to reproduce the technique of the composite portraiture, invented by Francis Galton, the father of “eugenics”. We will first reveal the major implication of photography within the constitution of a new quantified and physicalized image of the self at the end of the 19th century by examining Batut’s photography, notably the microstoria method. Secondly, we will examine the possibility that the historiographical technique of microstoria itself would be implausible without the emergence of a “photographic look”.