Ivy League Posture Photos
I've updated my comments about the posture photo program, so even if you've seen my previous posture photo posts, read on.
The Ivy League posture photo program originated at Harvard, which had taken nude posture photos of incoming freshmen since 1880. In 1940, the Harvard posture photo program was taken over by professor E.A. Hooten and psychologist William H. Sheldon. Sheldon was the inventor of the idea of "somotypes": ectomorph (skinny), mesomorph (muscular) and endomorph (fat) body types, which these researchers believed were correlated with mental properties such as personality and temperament. The also believed in Nazi-like eugenic theories, now completely discredited. They wanted to use the posture photos to "prove" their theories.
Somehow, Hooten and Sheldon convinced other Ivy League schools such as Yale and Princeton and some of their Seven Sisters counterparts such as Vassar, Smith, and Mt. Holyoke to start taking nude posture photos, which they did from the 1940s through the 1960s. (UPDATE: Yale, and possibly the other schools, were taking nude posture photos long before Hooten and Sheldon. The Yale nude posture photo program started in 1919.) There is no evidence that the people taking the photos at Yale and other schools believed in the eugenic theories or used the photos for anything more than detection of posture problems, although Sheldon may have gotten access to the photos.
Here are six more posture photos taken at Yale that I had the opportunity to acquire. Posture photos taken at Yale before 1952 were a side view, like all of these.
This is Yale freshman Robert Allardyce Cairns in 1948. The month is missing, but it was probably taken on the same day as the following photo, January 16, 1948.
Note the strange pins stuck to his back and chest. The pins were stuck on at certain points for later posture analysis. Supposedly, by examining the angles formed by connecting the points where the pins touched the body, certain posture problems could be detected.
This is Yale freshman Landon Crawford Burns, Jr. on January 16, 1948. The background, which is dark in all the other profile photos, almost looks like a photographic negative, except the student's body isn't a negative. I don't know why it came out that way, but that's what the original photo looks like.
This is Yale freshman Alister Michael Soutar on October 17, 1949.
This is Yale freshman Douglas Chapman Frackelton on October 20, 1949.
This is Yale freshman Aaron Joseph Siegal on October 21, 1949.
This is Yale freshman Herman Stanford Kohlmeyer, Jr. on October 18, 1949.
Were these photos an invasion of privacy for the students? By today's standards, yes. By the standards of the day, not so much. In that era, guys were routinely naked around each other in locker rooms and in swimming pools when women weren't present. Being asked to strip and even being photographed naked as part of a posture examination would not seem too outrageous, since the staff conducting this was all-male (and remember that Yale was an all-male school).
If any of these guys are still alive, my guess is that they would be happy for people to see what they looked like as fresh young 18-year-olds.
14 comments:
The second photo was probably solarized during the original printing process.
I always like their asses.
Are there any from University of Pennsylvania, my father Thomas Boylan, Jr. Class of 1942? Or Muybridge from U of P Class of 1899, my grandfather Thomas Boylan, Sr.? He was a freshman in '96.
I don't know if Penn participated in the nude posture photo program, but decades later, almost all the posture photos were burned. The only ones that escaped destruction and have become available to us all seem to be from Yale. Regarding Muybridge, he worked at Penn from 1882 to 1886, publishing the results in his 1887 book Animal Locomotion. He then traveled and gave lectures until 1894, when he retired and returned to England. So I'm afraid he and your grandfather would not have crossed paths.
Thanks for updating the background info. As I've mentioned previously, Sheldon produced the book "Atlas of Men" which had thousands of pictures of men classified into "somatypes." This book has faces and genitals blanked out.
I too would be curious to see how they are now.
Did they start out just doing views from the side and later add the full frontal and full dorsal? Or are these lads missing those?
At Yale, they took side views until 1952, when an apparatus with mirrors was installed to produce "PhotoMetric" posture photos showing front, rear, side and top view.
Thanks, Mike. I had forgotten about solarization, but I think you're right.
Damn! Should have done all views to begin with!
Don't worry, I have more of the "Photometric" photos that I will post in the future.
😁
So they used these pics to look for posture problem (supposedly that was all). I’m curious about the pins, taking only side picks you really cannot gage them. They just stick out. Think for side shot alone you would use 2 sets of pins one on both sides of the spine and see how far off they are!
A 1937 article in the Research Quarterly publication of the American Physical Education Association goes into great detail about the procedure at Yale. A doctor was present to judge whether the student had postural defects. However, the photo was an attempt to provide objective measurements that would not require a doctor's judgment. The pins were attached at specific points, e.g the 7th cervical vertebra, the greatest convexity of the dorsal curve, the greatest concavity of the lumbar curve, and others. How the pins stuck out was not important; where the pins were attached was important. Then, on the photograph, certain lines were drawn and angles were measured. For example drawing a line between the 7th cervical vertebra and the tragus of the ear and measuring the angle between that line and a horizontal line was supposed to objectively measure the position of the head and neck. Similar measurements were done for the back to detect kyphosis and lordosis (abnormal spinal curvatures).
Whether this whole procedure made any sense or not (in hindsight, evidently not, since nobody does it any more), that was what they were doing.
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