Ivy League Posture Photos - Part 15

 Ivy League Posture Photos

Yale started taking nude photos of incoming freshmen in 1919 as part of a program to detect and correct posture problems.  The Yale photos have erroneously been associated with William Sheldon, a psychologist at Harvard and author of Nazi-like eugenic theories who used Harvard nude posture photos to illustrate his theory of somatypes.  But, as far as I can tell, the Yale photos are not connected to Sheldon's work.

Here are five more posture photos taken at Yale that I had the opportunity to acquire.  For privacy reasons, I redact the names of men who might still be alive.  Four of these men have passed away, so their names are not redacted.

This is Yale freshman T.G. on Oct. 21, 1948.  Prior to 1952, the posture photos were like these ones, showing a side view.  In 1952, Yale installed an apparatus using mirrors to take posture photos showing front, rear, side and top views.  

This is Yale freshman Brandon James Hickey on Oct. 8, 1948.

This is Yale freshman Robert Evans Lewis on Oct. 8, 1948.  Note the strange pins stuck to each student's back and chest.  The pins were stuck on at specific 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 Stephen Albert Wareck on Oct. 8, 1948.

This is Yale freshman Julian Jay Wargo on Oct. 8, 1948.  He was of special interest to me because he went to the same high school as I did, although long before my time.

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).

Some of my followers have questioned the propriety of publishing these photos, since the students did not give consent for their publication.  My reply:

1. I only publish the names of students who have died.  To protect their privacy, I have redacted the names of students who may still be alive (despite the fact that their names have already been published on an online auction site).  Legally, the right to privacy does not extend beyond death, i.e. it does not extend to spouses, children, grandchildren, etc. of the deceased person.

2. In my opinion, publishing these photos is similar to publishing nude photos of athletes and soldiers taken by LIFE magazine photographers.  At the time, the understanding of the photo subjects was that photos with frontal nudity would never be published in the magazine (and they never were), but the LIFE photo archive containing those photos is now publicly available online, and nobody seems to be complaining about it.

3. I consider these photos to be a historical record of the time.  Almost all of the Ivy League posture photos were burned when their existence became widely known.  In my opinion, that was akin to book-burning of books that someone claimed were obscene.  These photos are not obscene.  They should be celebrated, not hidden away.