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. The Yale program predates Sheldon, and, as far as I can tell, the Yale photos were never 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. Two of these men have not passed away, so their names are redacted.
This is Yale freshman C.W. on Oct. 9, 1953.
In 1952, Yale installed an apparatus using mirrors to photograph the front, rear, side and top view, as seen in these photos. Prior to that, the posture photo was just a side view.
This is Yale freshman John S. Donovan on Oct. 14, 1953.
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 J.W. on Oct. 9, 1953.
If posture problems were detected, the student had to attend remedial posture sessions and a second posture photo as taken.
This is Yale freshman Neale W. Watson on Oct. 9, 1953.
The photography and analysis of the photos was conducted by the staff of Yale's Payne Whitney Gymnasium. Nobody outside this staff saw the photos, and the photos were not published for other students to see.
This is Yale freshman Phillips P. Wedermeyer on Oct. 9, 1953.
The posture photo program was discontinued in the 1960s, and later, most of the photos were burned. However, some of the photos escaped burning, including the photos that I have been showing in this series.
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Note: some of my followers have questioned the propriety of publishing these photos. If you think I should not publish them, please don't comment to that effect. Too much time and space has been taken up on the subject. We can agree to disagree. If you don't like it, go to some other blog. Here is my position:
1. 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.
2. To protect the privacy of the students, I redact the names of students who may still be alive. 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.
3. 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 not 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.
4. 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.
12 comments:
All those young men. All those penises and bare butts. Great photos!
I like seeing photos of the average male. Of course, my main interest is their penises.
I always enjoy their fine butts.
Is there a source for this photo?
Just as a matter of curiousity, were similar pictures taken of the female students? And NO I do not want to see them if there were. LOl
@gustav - Yale had female grad students, but posture photos were only taken of freshmen, who were all male until Yale went co-ed in 1969, after the posture photo program had ended. Other Ivy League schools that took posture photos such as Princeton and Harvard were also all-male at the time, but posture photos were also taken at women's colleges Vassar, Smith and Mt. Holyoke, though I have never seen any published. They may have all been burned. Rest assured that all the posture photos that I will be showing are male.
@Anon - The source, like all of the Yale photos in my "Ivy League Posture Photos" series, is a physical photo in my private collection that I scanned. In other words, this blog is the source, and you will not find these photos elsewhere.
My hope is that more photos of these male students....completely nude....will be shown on this blog. Very erotic in a way, even though the purpose was supposedly for research. But just knowing hundreds and hundreds of these male students were required to strip....woof!
Say you published a university photo of a young Joe Biden or McConnell or other top elected official who was student back then.
These photos are not unflattering. This do not show the person posing for porn, this was a physical exam thing. It was par for the course to have all students do this so does not reflect the individual's desire to pose naked.
So such an image would not be a stain on the person's personality/morals/etc so their publication would not really harm a public person's reputation.
Heck, imagine id the president explained such an image with "back then, men were not affraid to undrress in locker rooms" and that such images were perfectly normal, perhaps it might help to change younger generations who do the towel dance so they are never seen naked in locker rooms.
@Anon - I have many more of these photos yet to publish.
@Anon - Neither Joe Biden nor Mitch McConnell went to Yale, but other men who became politicians or otherwise became famous certainly did. I agree that publishing a nude posture photo of them should not be a stain on their reputation. However, out of concern for privacy and a desire not to cause embarrassment for any of the men in these photos, my policy is to redact the name in all photos of men who may still be alive. By the way, my collection does not include anyone famous, to the best of my knowledge.
these are great photos. i like batch 1954 everyone has the same arm postion.. keep them coming
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