This essay traces the main ways in which photography was taken up and used by supporters of the eugenics movement, from the time that Darwin's cousin, the British polymath Francis Galton, first used it to demonstrate the role played by heredity in human intelligence, to the early 1940s, when the eugenics movement lost much of its appeal. While this project, Galton's life's work, was largely a process of analysis and the development of dictates that could be put in place to shape the reproduction of the nation, it was also a project of imagination not only was Galton himself imagining a different future for Britain, but in promoting his program, he appealed to the imaginations of his readers in an attempt to get them to share his vision. (1883), Galton summarizes this aim as “to learn how far history may have shown the practicability of supplanting inefficient human stock by better strains, and to consider whether it might not be our duty to do so by such efforts as may be reasonable, thus exerting ourselves to further the ends of evolution more rapidly and with less distress than if events were left to their own course” (1–2). Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (1859), Francis Galton developed a program of eugenics that he believed could shape Britain's progress as a nation by managing the evolutionary development of the British race. That Charles Darwin attributed to heredity in
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