“the ‘mysterious connection’ between the image and the subject is mediated by three separate (yet intertwined) processes. Here, the trace of life is filtered through the life cast, the daguerreotype and the lithograph.”

This lithograph by Leveillé, made from a daguerreotype by the Bisson brothers, forms part of the published documentation of the material collected during French explorer Jules Sébastien César Dumont d’Urville’s 1837-1840 voyage through the Pacific and the Antarctic. This work was part of the important anthropological and geological atlas volume to the voyage, the multi-volume publication ‘Voyage au Pôle Sud et dans L’Océanie’.

This extraordinary project reproduced daguerreotypes taken by Louis-Auguste Bisson around 1841, a year after the voyage ended and at the dawn of the invention of photography. They show life-casts and skulls of pacific natives made and/or collected by the phrenologist, Pierre-Marie Dumoutier, who travelled with the expedition. Dumoutier was commissioned by Dumont d’Urville to collect casts of the indigenous populations. The materials were used to substantiate d’Urville’s belief in a stratified racial hierarchy among the inhabitants of the South Pacific region.

A pseudo-science popular in the 19th Century, phrenology involves the study of the shape and measurements of the skull to predict and determine variations in human temperament. Predicated on the belief that the relative size of different areas in the brain dictated personality and character, phrenological research was often enlisted to support prejudicial racial profiling and endorse colonialist imperatives.

The invention of photography occurred after Dumont d’Urville had set off but upon his return he had the materials he collected photographed. The life casts and skulls fulfilled a desire for objective accuracy and scientific exactitude and he quickly realized photography could satisfy the same agenda. According to Joanna Kane, an artist whose work references early nineteenth century phrenological casts, ‘the life or death mask can be considered the sculptural analogue of the photographic portrait. Both suggest direct traces from life, involve positive and negative, and evoke a mysterious connection between living, breathing subject and captured image.’ 4

The lithographs are remarkably successful in capturing the three-dimensionality inherent in the daguerreotype images of the casts and skulls. Several of Bisson’s daguerreotypes from the voyage have survived.

In the lithographs, the ‘mysterious connection’ between the image and the subject is mediated by three separate (yet intertwined) processes. Here, the trace of life is filtered through the life cast, the daguerreotype and the lithograph.