The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals

Charles Darwin is recognized as one of the early adopters of photography in scientific illustration, and much has been written about his use of photographs in the 1872 publication Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.The photographs included as evidence for Darwin’s theories were taken by professional photographers and printed as collotypes, while some of the images were translated into woodcut illustrations. Some were created especially for Darwin’s publication and others were already available. 

One photographer who worked with Darwin on this project was Oscar Rejlander, who is often described as “The Father of Art Photography.” Rejlander fought for the recognition of photography as a fine art. One of his most well-known photographs, The Two Ways of Life (c 1857), combined over thirty different negatives to create an original composition, and was purchased by Queen Victoria for her art collection.

Though it was important to Darwin to include photographs as illustrations of his work, largely due to the perceived evidentiary force of photography, scholars have shown that many of these photographs were manipulated in order to produce their desired effects. Oscar Rejlander’s photograph of a crying baby is one noteworthy example. Rejlander could not capture a clear image of a crying baby with the wet collodion technology available to him, so he made use of a pencil to render the image legible. The photograph is also known as “Ginx’s Baby,” after a character in a novel by Charles Dickens, and it circulated as a popular print. This example thus also shows how photographs can take on different meanings depending on the contexts in which they circulate. 

Bruce Peel Special Collections houses a German edition of the book. A full scan of the English edition is available through the Internet Archive.