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. All of these men have passed away, so their names are not redacted.
This is freshman William Henry Owen Kiekhofer on Oct. 3, 1941. 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 freshman Joseph Walter Neubert on Oct. 3, 1941. 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 freshman David Edgar Wright on Sept. 29, 1941.
This is freshman Manuel Thomas Aguilar on Feb. 1, 1951.
This is freshman Frank Joseph Kinney on Jan. 16, 1951.
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. To protect the privacy of the students, I redact the names of students who may still be alive (despite the fact that their names have already been published on an online auction site). I only publish the names of students who have died. 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.
6 comments:
I concur, Larry. These photos are NOT pornographic in any way.
There is a tendency to apply current codes of conduct to the past. For example, required showers as part of gym class or skinny-dipping at a boy's camp now are now viewed as traumatic experiences to young men. For those over 45 years-old, these events - at least for most - were treated as part of life. I grieve for a generation that is saturated with web porn, yet is embarrassed by or ashamed of incidental nudity. I doubt that the incoming New Haven freshmen felt as if they were being exploited by a patriarchal authority or hurt by this study.
Yes, our society today has a very sick view of being naked around others, even in male-only situations. Personally, I would very much appreciate it if open nudity was entirely legal and accepted.
these photos are not obscene, in fact, they are too chaste. I would say medical!
A different time, different rules. I'm thankful that these photos captured that point in time.
First, I appreciate those photos exactly because they show normal body in a "locker room" setting as opposed to porn studio with staged poses and fluffed yup genitalis that is never totally flaccid.
However, at the time those photos were taken, there was no Internet and there was a barrier between the scientists having bunch of photos and the rest of the world as these coudln't be published on some magical network that allows the whole world to see pictures. So the subjects could have agreed to those pictures because use of images outside of the scientific purpose was not contemplated. Swimming naked was not an issue because there was no fear of your image getting on the non-existent Internet.
So I can see how publication of such images goes beyond to what had been expected (and thus implicitely agreed) at the time. The other part of the equation is whether publication of such images in 2020s harms the original subject. These images are "factual" and do not degrade any of the subjects and show their body in a neutral fashion.
And in this day and age, seeing males in locker room nudity and locker room flaccidity is good education for younger generations who are brought up to think undressing in a locker room is a sin and never see peers naked.
So the value in the 2020s of seeing natural, normal male bodies in totally non sexual setting is, in my opinion, greater than any harm of publishing image of someone who had not expected such images to ever be published.
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