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Lost and Found
Physogs: a game with consequences Courtney E. Thompson* Mississippi State University, MS 39762, United States
A R T I C L E I N F O
A B S T R A C T
In 1939, an unusual card game, Physogs, debuted in the United Kingdom. Based on physiognomic principles, it instructed players as to how to read and construct facial features and character types. Thirty years later, a new form of composite facial recognition, Photofit, was incorporated into the practice of the British police. Both projects, Physogs and Photofit, were the brainchild of one man, Jacques Penry, representing his twentieth-century iteration of physiognomy. How did a card game become an origin point for a new approach to policing? © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
While historians have embraced various kinds of arcane and seemingly obscure artifacts as worthy of historical analysis— everything from quilts to taxidermy—games have received less attention.1 Board and card games can be rich examples of material culture, and are worth a closer look. In this essay, I make a case for
* Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (C.E. Thompson). Historians who have addressed relevant topics, like the history of childhood, learning practices, or toys and play, only mention board or card games in passing. See: Christopher P. Barton and Kyle Somerville, Historical Racialized Toys in the United States (Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2016), 41-2 and passim; Howard P. Chudacoff, Children at Play: An American History (New York: New York University Press, 2007), passim; Colin Heywood, A History of Childhood: Children and Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times (Cambridge, UK; Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2018), 93-4; Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, Teaching Children Science: HandsOn Nature Study in North America, 1890-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 115-6; Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 136; Rebecca Onion, Innocent Experiments: Childhood and the Culture of Popular Science in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). The field of the history of play is emerging; the interdisciplinary American Journal of Play, for example, was founded in 2008, but as of this date has not published any research articles focusing on board games, and only one article on a contemporary card game. Most work on board and card games has been produced by historians of education. On board and card games, see: David Wallace Adams and Victor Edmonds, “Making Your Move: The Educational Significance of the American Board Game, 1832-1904,” History of Education Quarterly 17, no. 4 (1977): 359-383; Jane Elizabeth Dove, “The Counties of England: A Nineteenth-century Geographical Game to Amuse and Instruct,” History of Education 43, no. 5 (2014): 691-707; Tristan Donovan, It’s All a Game: The History of Board Games from Monopoly to Settlers of Catan (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2017); Margaret Hofer, The Games We Played: The Golden Age of Board and Table Games (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003); Melanie Keene, “Playing Among the Stars: Science in Sport, or the Pleasures of Astronomy (1804),” History of Education 40, no. 4 (2011): 521-542; Scott Nicholson, “Playing in the Past: A History of Games, Toys, and Puzzles in North American Libraries,” Library Quarterly 83, no. 4 (2013): 341-361; David Parlett, Oxford History of Board Games (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 1
the game as artifact through an examination of one particularly intriguing game: Physogs: The Novel Card Game. Produced in 1939 by Waddy Productions in the United Kingdom, Physogs, as the name suggests, is a game about faces, about discerning judgment and character (Fig. 1). As the instructions state: THE OBJECT of the game is not merely the piecing together of features—but the building of faces, the features of which are consistent with each other. The eyes, nose, mouth, etc., must not, in its respective “character,” conflict with any other feature.2 The game is comprised of several components. First, there are four “frame cards,” 8.5 inches by 6.5 inches in size, each of which depict a head (two male and two female) with a rectangle cut out over the central facial features. The object of the game is to fill this void with eyes, nose, and mouth taken from the playing cards, with thirteen variations of each feature in the deck. A final set of thirteen cards, the “type cards,” provides a character type along with a set of descriptions of the relevant mouth, nose, or eyes. Each player begins with a hand of four cards, and with each turn, the player has the option to take a new card from the deck or the top discarded card to add to their four-card hand. The goal is to acquire four cards—mouth, nose, eyes, and type—that all correspond. Once this goal is reached, the player should yell “Physogs!” and check their results with the key book, to see if they have selected the appropriate features for their type. All players have their hands scored at this point, and then the game continues with a new, freshly dealt hand (or hands) until one player reaches a score of fifty. While it seems frivolous to modern eyes, the intent of the game was to convey purportedly scientific principles, promoting the theories of Jacques Penry. An obscure figure, Penry was a
2
Physogs: The Novel Card Game (Aldwych, London: Waddy Productions, 1939).
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Fig. 1. Physogs: The Novel Card Game, as it appears in the box. Image courtesy of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.
French-Canadian enthusiast of character interpretation. He wrote two books: Character from the Face, published in 1938 and reprinted in 1952, and The Face of Man, published in 1952.3 Penry produced Physogs around the same time he wrote Character, and both text and game share images and language regarding the practice of “reading character”: The purpose of this book is to make clear the essentials for determining facial character so that all guesswork is eliminated. With brief descriptions and clear-cut photographs the material is compiled in such a manner that the reader can analyse faces without any previous knowledge of the subject, physiognomy.4 If Character presented a detailed account of Penry’s theories of facial features, then Physogs provided a means to test one’s understanding of these principles. Both the book and the game were intended to be “an entertainment and an education,” able to provide “hours of fun” and “the most enjoyable of evenings in innumerable homes.”5
3 Jacques Penry, Character from the Face (London: Hutchinson & Co., [1938]); Jacques Penry, How to Judge Character from the Face (London: Hutchinson, 1952); Jacques Penry, The Face of Man (London: Rider and Company, 1952). 4 Penry, Character from the Face, 12. 5 Ibid., dust jacket and 10.
Character and Physogs replicated physiognomic arguments and visual judgments of the previous century, updated for the 1930s reader. Physiognomy, the art or science of reading character from the shape of the face, has a long history, dating to Aristotle.6 By the eighteenth century, it had largely declined in status, primarily associated with superstitious, vulgar practices like palmistry. In the 1770s, physiognomy was reinvigorated by the intervention of Swiss minister Johann Caspar Lavater, whose lavishly illustrated works helped to redefine physiognomy as a middle-class pastime. This set the stage in part for the introduction around the turn of the nineteenth century of a new science developed by German physicians and anatomists Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Gaspar
6 On physiognomy, see: Lucy Hartley, Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Richard T. Gray, About Face: German Physiognomic Thought from Lavater to Auschwitz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004); Christopher J. Lukasik, Discerning Characters: The Culture of Appearance in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2011); Sharrona Pearl, About Faces: Physiognomy in NineteenthCentury Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Ellis Shookman, ed., Faces of Physiognomy: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Johann Casper Lavater (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993); Graeme Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel: Faces and Fortunes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).
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Spurzheim, which would become known as phrenology.7 Phrenology, like physiognomy, tied appearances to character, focusing on the shape of the skull as indicative of the disposition of “organs” (areas of the skull, corresponding to parts of the brain) that were associated with particular aspects of character. By the mid-nineteenth century, phrenology, often presented in conversation (or confusion) with physiognomy, had become a widespread middle-class popular science, particularly in the Anglophone world, informing how middle-class observers looked at and described the faces, heads, and characters around them. Phrenology and physiognomy were also used to support social and political reformist discourse across the spectrum. Phrenology, for example, was mobilized in abolitionist discourse even as it was used to support slavery, white supremacy, and imperialism.8 Similarly, physiognomy more broadly served to support racial hierarchies and assumptions about ethnic groups in both the United States and Europe well into the twentieth century.9 If phrenology was in decline by the turn of the twentieth century, it nevertheless provided a route for continued cultural conversations about the correspondences between heads and characters and therefore for the continued spread of physiognomic thinking.
7 The literature on phrenology is vast and cannot be fully explicated here. On phrenology, see: Carla Bittel, “Testing the Truth of Phrenology: Knowledge Experiments in Antebellum American Cultures of Science and Health,” Medical History 63, no. 3 (2019): 352-374; Carla Bittel, “Woman, Know Thyself: Producing and Using Phrenological Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America,” Centaurus 55, no. 2 (2013): 104-130; G. N. Cantor, “A Critique of Shapin’s Social Interpretation of the Edinburgh Phrenology Debate,” Annals of Science 32, no. 3 (1975): 245-256; G. N. Cantor, “The Edinburgh Phrenology Debate: 1803-1828,” Annals of Science 32, no. 3 (1975): 195-218; Charles Colbert, A Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Roger Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-century Britain (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984); John D. Davies, Phrenology: Fad and Science. A 19th-Century American Crusade (Archon Books, 1971 [1955]); David De Giustino, Conquest of Mind: Phrenology and Victorian Social Thought (London: Croon Helm, 1975); Sherrie Lynne Lyons, Species, Serpents, Spirits, and Skulls: Science at the Margins in the Victorian Age (Albany: State University of New York, 2009); James Poskett, Materials of the Mind: Phrenology, Race, and the Global History of Science, 1815-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019); Marc Renneville, Langage des crânes: histoire de la phre’nologie (Paris: Institut d'e’dition, Sanofi-Synthe’labo, c2000); Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Steven Shapin, “Phrenological Knowledge and the Social Structure of Early Nineteenth-century Edinburgh,” Annals of Science 32, no. 3 (1975): 219-243; Steven Shapin, “The Politics of Observation: Cerebral Anatomy and Social Interests in the Edinburgh Phrenology Disputes,” Sociological Review 27 (Supplement, May 1979): 139-178; David Stack, Queen Victoria’s Skull: George Combe and the midVictorian Mind (London; New York: Hambledon Continuum, 2008); Madeleine B. Stern, Heads and Headlines: The Phrenological Fowlers (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971); Daniel Patrick Thurs, Science Talk: Changing Notions of Science in American Popular Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007); Stephen Tomlinson. Head Masters: Phrenology, Secular Education, and Nineteenth-century Social Thought (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2005); John Van Wyhe, “The Authority of Human Nature: The Schädellehre of Franz Joseph Gall,” The British Journal for the History of Science 25, no. 1 (2002): 17-42; John Van Wyhe, Phrenology and the Origins of Victorian Scientific Naturalism. Science, Technology, and Culture, 1700-1945 (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2004); John van Wyhe, “Was Phrenology a Reform Science? Towards a New Generalization for Phrenology,” History of Science 42, no. 3 (2004): 313-331; Robert M. Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). 8 On the uses of phrenology to inform discourse about race, abolition, and slavery, particularly in the United States, see: Susan Branson, “Phrenology and the Science of Race in Antebellum America,” Early American History: An Interdisciplinary Journal 15, no. 1 (2017): 164-193, on 181-182. On abolitionism and anti-slavery in phrenology, see also: Cynthia S. Hamilton, “‘Am I Not a Man and a Brother?’ Phrenology and Antislavery,” Slavery and Abolition 29, no. 2 (2008): 173-187; Poskett, Materials of the Mind; James Poskett, “Phrenology, Correspondence, and the Global Politics of Reform, 1815-1848,” The Historical Journal 60, no. 2 (2017): 409-442. 9 Pearl discusses physiognomy as it informed stereotypes about the Irish and the Jews in the British context. Gray discusses the longevity of physiognomic thought in Germany and its influence on Nazi racial science. See: Pearl, About Faces, 106-147; Gray, About Face, 219-272.
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Penry’s later book, The Face of Man, provided an updated framework for his approach. Though it mentioned physiognomy it also mobilized the language and findings of psychoanalysis, psychology, and endocrinology, with broad citations ranging from the Bible and Ancient authorities like Pliny and Aristotle to modern thinkers like Henry Maudsley and a host of contemporary endocrinologists, physicians, and geneticists. Penry’s physiognomy became thoroughly glandular in this iteration, and the 133 photographs of Character were largely replaced with line drawings and charts, most of which illustrated the actions of different glands on the character and shape of the face. Penry’s books reflected the increasing utility of endocrinology as an explanatory system, even if the central theory was still stuck in the past: as one reviewer noted, the theories “despite the hormonal approach, follow the nineteenth-century physiognomic line.”10 Physogs, though an artifact of Penry’s peculiar, “modern” physiognomic point of view, seems to require further explanation. Most pop scientific writers do not produce tie-in games to complement their books, even in our contemporary age of enthusiasm for maximizing revenue streams and promoting brand identity. What or who was Physogs for? At the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, I had the opportunity to try to answer this question. Rachel Ingold, the Curator of the History of Medicine Collections, was kind enough to accommodate a most unusual request: I wanted to try to play Physogs. Rachel and I, along with two of her colleagues, Taylor de Klerk and Brooke Guthrie, took an hour to unpack Physogs, examine the instructions, and play the game. While the goal of Physogs is to produce a face comprised of mouth, nose, and eyes that correspond to a particular character type (Fig. 2), we quickly learned that to try to construct such a face was an exercise in frustration. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of the vocabulary or phrases used to describe the facial features were unfamiliar to us, whether due to time or British idiom. What, precisely, does “finely textured skin” indicate, particularly in greyscale images of only adequate resolution? More frustrating, however, were the vagaries and similarities in the descriptions themselves. How was one to distinguish between “medium-thin lips” and “medium-full lips”? What does “well proportioned” signify? What does it mean for a nose to have a “muscular appearance”? This linguistic confusion was not alleviated by examining the image cards. If the descriptions were sometimes quite similar, the image cards often seemed nearly identical. Noses, in particular, posed a problem. We spent a disproportionate amount of time scrutinizing a series of seemingly identical noses in the attempt to distinguish between them, with little success (Fig. 3). Mouths and eyes were not always much easier. As most lips have a “series of curves in mouth,” it is difficult to determine which curves are sufficiently curvy to count. The final frustration was scoring itself. The end of the first round was reached by Rachel calling “Physogs!” According to the rules, the person who calls “Physogs!” would receive ten points for a successful “face”—provided that their assemblage perfectly matched that found in the key book. But any card that didn’t match its key resulted in a loss of five points. For the rest of us, there would be a two-point gain for any card that matched the key book. Rachel’s cards, unfortunately, did not quite match, so her “winning” hand resulted in a net loss of five points. Winning was made harder by the specificity required for assembling faces. Only thirteen character types could be constructed, and most required three precise cards (thankfully, some allowed for two possible
10 Stanley M. Garn, “Concave Noses Are Sensory,” Contemporary Psychology 1, no. 2 (1956): 54.
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Fig. 2. A completed Physogs face card, depicting a “Determined” face. Image courtesy of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.
correct noses). One needed not to simply “make a face,” but to make a face with the correct cards. Even cards that we agreed looked very similar, or which had images which seemed to correspond with the description given on the type card, did not count. The odds were not in our favor. We did not play to fifty points, suspecting that the penalties for incorrect cards and the incremental point gains would make for an unending game. It became apparent to us, however, that there was
a way to game the game. While one was not supposed to look at the key book until scoring, a savvy player could simply study the key book in advance and memorize the card numbers needed to complete a hand for a given character type. Surely some enterprising (and competitive) players of the 1930s and 1940s did just that. The constructed faces themselves were instructive, if occasionally disturbing, as the effect of a finished face often evoked the
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Fig. 3. All of the type cards for noses in Physogs. Image courtesy of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.
uncanny valley.11 To us, the “Suave—Obsequious” face proved the most unsettling, mostly due to an overlong mouth with a closelipped smile. With the “Magnetic” type, something may have been lost in translation across time and space, as rather than magnetic she appeared instead to be somewhat murderous, perhaps due to shifting aesthetic standards (Fig. 4). Similarly, “Dissipated” seemed somewhat avuncular, whereas “Pleasant—Cheerful” appeared to be slightly manic (Fig. 5). Other identity markers functioned in intriguing ways. While all of the frame cards and feature cards depicted white individuals,
11 Our responses to these composite faces were quite subjective, possibly informed by cultural experiences with other “constructed” faces of the 21st century—from advances in photography (and Photoshop, and other kinds of digital enhancements or filters) to CGI creations for the silver screen. In some ways, these faces looked less true-to-life than the kinds of digitally enhanced or wholesale constructed faces with which our group was most familiar, hence our descent into the uncanny valley.
thus erasing non-white ethnicities from this game, the description for “Acquisitive—Shrewd” included a nose characterized as “Long, wide-ridged, with noticeably drooping tip” (Fig. 6). This description recalled those of nineteenth-century physiognomists, who promoted a stereotyped Jewish nose and connected Jewish ethnicity to acquisitiveness.12 The types themselves were also heavily gendered. Some allowed for either male or female constructions, including “Bad-Tempered,” “Narrow-Minded—Stubborn,” and both the previously mentioned “Suave—Obsequious” and “Acquisitive—Shrewd.” However, “Dissipated,” “Excitable— Impetuous,” and “Determined” could only be constructed as male faces, and “Magnetic,” “Self-Conscious,” “Artistic—Imaginative,” “Pleasant—Cheerful,” and “Credulous—Impractical” were female faces. While men could be “Determined,” woman must be
12 Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York; Oxford; Routledge, 1991), 169-193; Pearl, About Faces, 50, 128-145.
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Fig. 4. All of the type cards for noses in Physogs. Image courtesy of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.
“Self-Conscious”; men could be “Dissipated” but women were more likely to be “Pleasant—Cheerful.” It was not surprising that the two cards depicting full, smiling mouths showing teeth could only be attached to female types, recalling an enduring cultural imperative that women smile. The most superficially attractive features and faces were associated with positive character traits, whereas the less attractive features—unsymmetrical, coarser, and wrinkled—signaled less savory types. In this, Physogs was pure physiognomy, or even fairy tale: with virtue, beauty, and with vice, plainness or even ugliness.
Playing Physogs in 2019 was an imperfect form of experiential history. We four players were not 1930s Britons, and our cultural norms, language, assumptions, and critical lenses were quite different. Yet by the second round of play, we were already learning the visual language and vocabulary of discerning faces. While this might be viewed as mere pattern recognition (and it was), this pattern recognition was, for Penry, precisely the point. By learning to recognize these patterns and build these faces, we were enculturing ourselves to his worldview, learning to associate facial features with character types. The game was teaching us to discern
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Fig. 5. A “Pleasant—Cheerful” face. Image courtesy of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.
and assemble both faces and characters, according to Penry’s model. It is hard to tell how popular this game was, or what lessons 1930s or 1940s players might have learned. Perhaps they would have been as frustrated as we were, and after a few attempts the game was relegated to a dusty closet and forgotten. But whatever the fate of Physogs, Penry—and his peculiar way of looking at faces—was not put on a shelf. Indeed, to the extent to which Penry
appears within the historical record, it is for another innovation: Photofit, a key step in the development of modern facial composite systems used by police.13 By the early 1950s, around the time that Character was republished and Faces premiered, Penry had become an occasional
13
Given alternately as Photofit or Photo-Fit.
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Fig. 6. An “Acquisitive—Shrewd” face. Image courtesy of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.
talking head for British television. After appearing in two BBC programs in which he discussed his method of creating composite faces, Penry’s project caught the attention of the police.14 In 1968,
14 “Aids to Identification—A New Method,” The Police Journal 28, no. 3 (1955): 220229; Jacques Penry, “PHOTO-FIT,” The Police Journal 43, no. 7 (1970): 307-316.
Penry contracted with the British Home Office Police Research and Development Branch to grant the rights to his system for police use, which reciprocated by allowing Penry access to police photographic files.15 From this archive he composed sets of noses,
15
Penry, “PHOTO-FIT,” 307.
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eyes, hairlines, ears, and other features to allow for the construction of new faces within the police frame.16 Penry maintained that his PhotoFit system, though introduced a few years after the comparable American Identikit system, was in fact a “completely original conception, and not a development of any other facial identification system.”17 Indeed, Penry described the development of this concept as a byproduct of his earlier projects: My experiments with this idea resulted in my inventing a card game called PHYSOGS which came on the British market in 1939. PHYSOGS was, however, intended solely as a test of players’ skill in terms of varying kinds of personality and character. While the mechanics were different from PHOTOFIT’s, the principle of feature-assembly with photographs was firmly, if indirectly, established. (It did not occur to me then that this could be used in a police facial identification system.)18 This lineage connecting play and practice was visually selfevident: Photofit images used in warrant posters and newspaper notices from the 1970s had a visible bricolage effect indicating where the facial parts came together, closely mimicking the appearance of a completed Physogs frame card. Penry’s Photofit had a longer shelf life and more robust reception than his books or Physogs. It was rapidly incorporated into the mechanisms of police surveillance, to such an extent that its utility and effects of this system became objects of psychological study through the 1970s by a group of Aberdeen researchers.19 These studies at first glance seemed to validate Penry’s insistence of the psychological and scientific content of his approach, though the results were generally critical. Some findings suggested that physiognomic associations were hard to break, even as the twentieth century came to a close: facial features continued to convey moral meanings, and attractiveness (or the converse) still signaled goodness (or its antithesis).20 Other studies suggested similar problems as those we identified while playing Physogs: noses, for example, were difficult for everyone to tell apart.21 Over
16 On Penry and Photofit, see: Edward Higgs, Identifying the English: A History of Personal Identification 1500 to the Present (London: Continuum, 2011), 128-129; Sarah Kember, Virtual Anxiety: Photography, New Technologies, and Subjectivity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 45-49. 17 Penry, “PHOTO-FIT,” 308. 18 Ibid., 308-9. 19 Graham Davies, Hadyn Ellis, and John Shepherd, “Cue Saliency in Faces as Assessed by the ‘Photofit’ Technique,” Perception 6, no. 3 (1977): 263-269; Hadyn D. Ellis, Graham M. Davies, and John W. Shepherd, “A Critical Examination of the Photofit System for Recalling Faces,” Ergonomics 21, no. 4 (1978): 297-307; Hadyn D. Ellis, Graham M. Davies, and John W. Shepherd, “Remembering Pictures of Real and ‘Unreal’ Faces: Some Practical and Theoretical Considerations,” British Journal of Psychology 69 (1978): 467-474; Hadyn Ellis, John Shepherd, and Graham Davies, “An Investigation of the Use of the Photo-Fit Technique for Recalling Faces,” British Journal of Psychology 66, no. 1 (1975): 29-37; J. W. Shepherd, H.D. Ellis, Mary McMurran, and G. M. Davies, “Effect of Character Attribution on Photofit Construction of a Face,” European Journal of Social Psychology 8 (1978): 263-268; among others. 20 Shepherd et al., “Effect of Character Attribution.” 21 Davies et al., “Cue Saliency,” 268.
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time, the cluster of studies focusing on evaluating Photofit came to identify a series of weaknesses to the system, leading to collaboration between researchers and the Police Science Development Branch to improve the system between the 1970s and 1980s.22 More recently, newer systems have emerged to replace Photofit, though still similar in name, kind, and method.23 Photofit, of course, was not Physogs, and police composites are not an idle game. If nothing else, the scale of Penry’s program expanded widely. The original game only allowed for thirteen “correct” faces corresponding with types, and all faces were ostensibly constructed of white features. Between its introduction in 1970 and 1973, the Photofit database grew, from an original 5.4 billion possible faces for white men alone to 12.9 billion possible white male faces and a new roster of non-white, male faces.24 Yet the concept of the game led to the development of a system that enabled and furthered police surveillance. Even though Penry’s approach was based on old-fashioned physiognomic thinking, it was adapted to become an essential technique of “modern” policing. Thus, seemingly abandoned scientific ideas became incorporated into self-consciously “modern” scientific practices, ensuring their continued influence. The children who grew up constructing faces for fun with Physogs would, as adults, open up The Times to find eerily familiar facial reconstructions peering back at them: a mechanism of play became a tool for policing. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Melissa Grafe at the Medical Historical Library of the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library of Yale University for introducing me to Physogs. This project would not have been possible without Rachel Ingold, Taylor de Klerk, and Brooke Guthrie of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library of Duke University; I appreciate them taking the time to play this game with me. Kelly O’Donnell and Scott DiGiulio provided valuable comments and feedback on this essay.
22 Graham M. Davies and Andrew W. Young, “Research on Face Recognition: The Aberdeen Influence,” British Journal of Psychology 108 (2017); 812-830, on 818-819. 23 Kember, Virtual Anxiety, 49-54. 24 For Asian and African men, the kit boasted 500 million possibilities; a female kit was not developed until 1973. Fowler, Norman, “5,400m-face identity kit,” The Times (London, England), 23 April 1970; “Photofit inventor to make a kit for women,” The Times (London, England), 14 May 1973.
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Lost and Found
Physogs: a game with consequences Courtney E. Thompson* Mississippi State University, MS 39762, United States
A R T I C L E I N F O
A B S T R A C T
In 1939, an unusual card game, Physogs, debuted in the United Kingdom. Based on physiognomic principles, it instructed players as to how to read and construct facial features and character types. Thirty years later, a new form of composite facial recognition, Photofit, was incorporated into the practice of the British police. Both projects, Physogs and Photofit, were the brainchild of one man, Jacques Penry, representing his twentieth-century iteration of physiognomy. How did a card game become an origin point for a new approach to policing? © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
While historians have embraced various kinds of arcane and seemingly obscure artifacts as worthy of historical analysis— everything from quilts to taxidermy—games have received less attention.1 Board and card games can be rich examples of material culture, and are worth a closer look. In this essay, I make a case for
* Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (C.E. Thompson). Historians who have addressed relevant topics, like the history of childhood, learning practices, or toys and play, only mention board or card games in passing. See: Christopher P. Barton and Kyle Somerville, Historical Racialized Toys in the United States (Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2016), 41-2 and passim; Howard P. Chudacoff, Children at Play: An American History (New York: New York University Press, 2007), passim; Colin Heywood, A History of Childhood: Children and Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times (Cambridge, UK; Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2018), 93-4; Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, Teaching Children Science: HandsOn Nature Study in North America, 1890-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 115-6; Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 136; Rebecca Onion, Innocent Experiments: Childhood and the Culture of Popular Science in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). The field of the history of play is emerging; the interdisciplinary American Journal of Play, for example, was founded in 2008, but as of this date has not published any research articles focusing on board games, and only one article on a contemporary card game. Most work on board and card games has been produced by historians of education. On board and card games, see: David Wallace Adams and Victor Edmonds, “Making Your Move: The Educational Significance of the American Board Game, 1832-1904,” History of Education Quarterly 17, no. 4 (1977): 359-383; Jane Elizabeth Dove, “The Counties of England: A Nineteenth-century Geographical Game to Amuse and Instruct,” History of Education 43, no. 5 (2014): 691-707; Tristan Donovan, It’s All a Game: The History of Board Games from Monopoly to Settlers of Catan (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2017); Margaret Hofer, The Games We Played: The Golden Age of Board and Table Games (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003); Melanie Keene, “Playing Among the Stars: Science in Sport, or the Pleasures of Astronomy (1804),” History of Education 40, no. 4 (2011): 521-542; Scott Nicholson, “Playing in the Past: A History of Games, Toys, and Puzzles in North American Libraries,” Library Quarterly 83, no. 4 (2013): 341-361; David Parlett, Oxford History of Board Games (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 1
the game as artifact through an examination of one particularly intriguing game: Physogs: The Novel Card Game. Produced in 1939 by Waddy Productions in the United Kingdom, Physogs, as the name suggests, is a game about faces, about discerning judgment and character (Fig. 1). As the instructions state: THE OBJECT of the game is not merely the piecing together of features—but the building of faces, the features of which are consistent with each other. The eyes, nose, mouth, etc., must not, in its respective “character,” conflict with any other feature.2 The game is comprised of several components. First, there are four “frame cards,” 8.5 inches by 6.5 inches in size, each of which depict a head (two male and two female) with a rectangle cut out over the central facial features. The object of the game is to fill this void with eyes, nose, and mouth taken from the playing cards, with thirteen variations of each feature in the deck. A final set of thirteen cards, the “type cards,” provides a character type along with a set of descriptions of the relevant mouth, nose, or eyes. Each player begins with a hand of four cards, and with each turn, the player has the option to take a new card from the deck or the top discarded card to add to their four-card hand. The goal is to acquire four cards—mouth, nose, eyes, and type—that all correspond. Once this goal is reached, the player should yell “Physogs!” and check their results with the key book, to see if they have selected the appropriate features for their type. All players have their hands scored at this point, and then the game continues with a new, freshly dealt hand (or hands) until one player reaches a score of fifty. While it seems frivolous to modern eyes, the intent of the game was to convey purportedly scientific principles, promoting the theories of Jacques Penry. An obscure figure, Penry was a
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Physogs: The Novel Card Game (Aldwych, London: Waddy Productions, 1939).
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Fig. 1. Physogs: The Novel Card Game, as it appears in the box. Image courtesy of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.
French-Canadian enthusiast of character interpretation. He wrote two books: Character from the Face, published in 1938 and reprinted in 1952, and The Face of Man, published in 1952.3 Penry produced Physogs around the same time he wrote Character, and both text and game share images and language regarding the practice of “reading character”: The purpose of this book is to make clear the essentials for determining facial character so that all guesswork is eliminated. With brief descriptions and clear-cut photographs the material is compiled in such a manner that the reader can analyse faces without any previous knowledge of the subject, physiognomy.4 If Character presented a detailed account of Penry’s theories of facial features, then Physogs provided a means to test one’s understanding of these principles. Both the book and the game were intended to be “an entertainment and an education,” able to provide “hours of fun” and “the most enjoyable of evenings in innumerable homes.”5
3 Jacques Penry, Character from the Face (London: Hutchinson & Co., [1938]); Jacques Penry, How to Judge Character from the Face (London: Hutchinson, 1952); Jacques Penry, The Face of Man (London: Rider and Company, 1952). 4 Penry, Character from the Face, 12. 5 Ibid., dust jacket and 10.
Character and Physogs replicated physiognomic arguments and visual judgments of the previous century, updated for the 1930s reader. Physiognomy, the art or science of reading character from the shape of the face, has a long history, dating to Aristotle.6 By the eighteenth century, it had largely declined in status, primarily associated with superstitious, vulgar practices like palmistry. In the 1770s, physiognomy was reinvigorated by the intervention of Swiss minister Johann Caspar Lavater, whose lavishly illustrated works helped to redefine physiognomy as a middle-class pastime. This set the stage in part for the introduction around the turn of the nineteenth century of a new science developed by German physicians and anatomists Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Gaspar
6 On physiognomy, see: Lucy Hartley, Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Richard T. Gray, About Face: German Physiognomic Thought from Lavater to Auschwitz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004); Christopher J. Lukasik, Discerning Characters: The Culture of Appearance in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2011); Sharrona Pearl, About Faces: Physiognomy in NineteenthCentury Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Ellis Shookman, ed., Faces of Physiognomy: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Johann Casper Lavater (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993); Graeme Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel: Faces and Fortunes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).
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Spurzheim, which would become known as phrenology.7 Phrenology, like physiognomy, tied appearances to character, focusing on the shape of the skull as indicative of the disposition of “organs” (areas of the skull, corresponding to parts of the brain) that were associated with particular aspects of character. By the mid-nineteenth century, phrenology, often presented in conversation (or confusion) with physiognomy, had become a widespread middle-class popular science, particularly in the Anglophone world, informing how middle-class observers looked at and described the faces, heads, and characters around them. Phrenology and physiognomy were also used to support social and political reformist discourse across the spectrum. Phrenology, for example, was mobilized in abolitionist discourse even as it was used to support slavery, white supremacy, and imperialism.8 Similarly, physiognomy more broadly served to support racial hierarchies and assumptions about ethnic groups in both the United States and Europe well into the twentieth century.9 If phrenology was in decline by the turn of the twentieth century, it nevertheless provided a route for continued cultural conversations about the correspondences between heads and characters and therefore for the continued spread of physiognomic thinking.
7 The literature on phrenology is vast and cannot be fully explicated here. On phrenology, see: Carla Bittel, “Testing the Truth of Phrenology: Knowledge Experiments in Antebellum American Cultures of Science and Health,” Medical History 63, no. 3 (2019): 352-374; Carla Bittel, “Woman, Know Thyself: Producing and Using Phrenological Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America,” Centaurus 55, no. 2 (2013): 104-130; G. N. Cantor, “A Critique of Shapin’s Social Interpretation of the Edinburgh Phrenology Debate,” Annals of Science 32, no. 3 (1975): 245-256; G. N. Cantor, “The Edinburgh Phrenology Debate: 1803-1828,” Annals of Science 32, no. 3 (1975): 195-218; Charles Colbert, A Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Roger Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-century Britain (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984); John D. Davies, Phrenology: Fad and Science. A 19th-Century American Crusade (Archon Books, 1971 [1955]); David De Giustino, Conquest of Mind: Phrenology and Victorian Social Thought (London: Croon Helm, 1975); Sherrie Lynne Lyons, Species, Serpents, Spirits, and Skulls: Science at the Margins in the Victorian Age (Albany: State University of New York, 2009); James Poskett, Materials of the Mind: Phrenology, Race, and the Global History of Science, 1815-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019); Marc Renneville, Langage des crânes: histoire de la phre’nologie (Paris: Institut d'e’dition, Sanofi-Synthe’labo, c2000); Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Steven Shapin, “Phrenological Knowledge and the Social Structure of Early Nineteenth-century Edinburgh,” Annals of Science 32, no. 3 (1975): 219-243; Steven Shapin, “The Politics of Observation: Cerebral Anatomy and Social Interests in the Edinburgh Phrenology Disputes,” Sociological Review 27 (Supplement, May 1979): 139-178; David Stack, Queen Victoria’s Skull: George Combe and the midVictorian Mind (London; New York: Hambledon Continuum, 2008); Madeleine B. Stern, Heads and Headlines: The Phrenological Fowlers (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971); Daniel Patrick Thurs, Science Talk: Changing Notions of Science in American Popular Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007); Stephen Tomlinson. Head Masters: Phrenology, Secular Education, and Nineteenth-century Social Thought (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2005); John Van Wyhe, “The Authority of Human Nature: The Schädellehre of Franz Joseph Gall,” The British Journal for the History of Science 25, no. 1 (2002): 17-42; John Van Wyhe, Phrenology and the Origins of Victorian Scientific Naturalism. Science, Technology, and Culture, 1700-1945 (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2004); John van Wyhe, “Was Phrenology a Reform Science? Towards a New Generalization for Phrenology,” History of Science 42, no. 3 (2004): 313-331; Robert M. Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). 8 On the uses of phrenology to inform discourse about race, abolition, and slavery, particularly in the United States, see: Susan Branson, “Phrenology and the Science of Race in Antebellum America,” Early American History: An Interdisciplinary Journal 15, no. 1 (2017): 164-193, on 181-182. On abolitionism and anti-slavery in phrenology, see also: Cynthia S. Hamilton, “‘Am I Not a Man and a Brother?’ Phrenology and Antislavery,” Slavery and Abolition 29, no. 2 (2008): 173-187; Poskett, Materials of the Mind; James Poskett, “Phrenology, Correspondence, and the Global Politics of Reform, 1815-1848,” The Historical Journal 60, no. 2 (2017): 409-442. 9 Pearl discusses physiognomy as it informed stereotypes about the Irish and the Jews in the British context. Gray discusses the longevity of physiognomic thought in Germany and its influence on Nazi racial science. See: Pearl, About Faces, 106-147; Gray, About Face, 219-272.
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Penry’s later book, The Face of Man, provided an updated framework for his approach. Though it mentioned physiognomy it also mobilized the language and findings of psychoanalysis, psychology, and endocrinology, with broad citations ranging from the Bible and Ancient authorities like Pliny and Aristotle to modern thinkers like Henry Maudsley and a host of contemporary endocrinologists, physicians, and geneticists. Penry’s physiognomy became thoroughly glandular in this iteration, and the 133 photographs of Character were largely replaced with line drawings and charts, most of which illustrated the actions of different glands on the character and shape of the face. Penry’s books reflected the increasing utility of endocrinology as an explanatory system, even if the central theory was still stuck in the past: as one reviewer noted, the theories “despite the hormonal approach, follow the nineteenth-century physiognomic line.”10 Physogs, though an artifact of Penry’s peculiar, “modern” physiognomic point of view, seems to require further explanation. Most pop scientific writers do not produce tie-in games to complement their books, even in our contemporary age of enthusiasm for maximizing revenue streams and promoting brand identity. What or who was Physogs for? At the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, I had the opportunity to try to answer this question. Rachel Ingold, the Curator of the History of Medicine Collections, was kind enough to accommodate a most unusual request: I wanted to try to play Physogs. Rachel and I, along with two of her colleagues, Taylor de Klerk and Brooke Guthrie, took an hour to unpack Physogs, examine the instructions, and play the game. While the goal of Physogs is to produce a face comprised of mouth, nose, and eyes that correspond to a particular character type (Fig. 2), we quickly learned that to try to construct such a face was an exercise in frustration. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of the vocabulary or phrases used to describe the facial features were unfamiliar to us, whether due to time or British idiom. What, precisely, does “finely textured skin” indicate, particularly in greyscale images of only adequate resolution? More frustrating, however, were the vagaries and similarities in the descriptions themselves. How was one to distinguish between “medium-thin lips” and “medium-full lips”? What does “well proportioned” signify? What does it mean for a nose to have a “muscular appearance”? This linguistic confusion was not alleviated by examining the image cards. If the descriptions were sometimes quite similar, the image cards often seemed nearly identical. Noses, in particular, posed a problem. We spent a disproportionate amount of time scrutinizing a series of seemingly identical noses in the attempt to distinguish between them, with little success (Fig. 3). Mouths and eyes were not always much easier. As most lips have a “series of curves in mouth,” it is difficult to determine which curves are sufficiently curvy to count. The final frustration was scoring itself. The end of the first round was reached by Rachel calling “Physogs!” According to the rules, the person who calls “Physogs!” would receive ten points for a successful “face”—provided that their assemblage perfectly matched that found in the key book. But any card that didn’t match its key resulted in a loss of five points. For the rest of us, there would be a two-point gain for any card that matched the key book. Rachel’s cards, unfortunately, did not quite match, so her “winning” hand resulted in a net loss of five points. Winning was made harder by the specificity required for assembling faces. Only thirteen character types could be constructed, and most required three precise cards (thankfully, some allowed for two possible
10 Stanley M. Garn, “Concave Noses Are Sensory,” Contemporary Psychology 1, no. 2 (1956): 54.
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Fig. 2. A completed Physogs face card, depicting a “Determined” face. Image courtesy of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.
correct noses). One needed not to simply “make a face,” but to make a face with the correct cards. Even cards that we agreed looked very similar, or which had images which seemed to correspond with the description given on the type card, did not count. The odds were not in our favor. We did not play to fifty points, suspecting that the penalties for incorrect cards and the incremental point gains would make for an unending game. It became apparent to us, however, that there was
a way to game the game. While one was not supposed to look at the key book until scoring, a savvy player could simply study the key book in advance and memorize the card numbers needed to complete a hand for a given character type. Surely some enterprising (and competitive) players of the 1930s and 1940s did just that. The constructed faces themselves were instructive, if occasionally disturbing, as the effect of a finished face often evoked the
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Fig. 3. All of the type cards for noses in Physogs. Image courtesy of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.
uncanny valley.11 To us, the “Suave—Obsequious” face proved the most unsettling, mostly due to an overlong mouth with a closelipped smile. With the “Magnetic” type, something may have been lost in translation across time and space, as rather than magnetic she appeared instead to be somewhat murderous, perhaps due to shifting aesthetic standards (Fig. 4). Similarly, “Dissipated” seemed somewhat avuncular, whereas “Pleasant—Cheerful” appeared to be slightly manic (Fig. 5). Other identity markers functioned in intriguing ways. While all of the frame cards and feature cards depicted white individuals,
11 Our responses to these composite faces were quite subjective, possibly informed by cultural experiences with other “constructed” faces of the 21st century—from advances in photography (and Photoshop, and other kinds of digital enhancements or filters) to CGI creations for the silver screen. In some ways, these faces looked less true-to-life than the kinds of digitally enhanced or wholesale constructed faces with which our group was most familiar, hence our descent into the uncanny valley.
thus erasing non-white ethnicities from this game, the description for “Acquisitive—Shrewd” included a nose characterized as “Long, wide-ridged, with noticeably drooping tip” (Fig. 6). This description recalled those of nineteenth-century physiognomists, who promoted a stereotyped Jewish nose and connected Jewish ethnicity to acquisitiveness.12 The types themselves were also heavily gendered. Some allowed for either male or female constructions, including “Bad-Tempered,” “Narrow-Minded—Stubborn,” and both the previously mentioned “Suave—Obsequious” and “Acquisitive—Shrewd.” However, “Dissipated,” “Excitable— Impetuous,” and “Determined” could only be constructed as male faces, and “Magnetic,” “Self-Conscious,” “Artistic—Imaginative,” “Pleasant—Cheerful,” and “Credulous—Impractical” were female faces. While men could be “Determined,” woman must be
12 Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York; Oxford; Routledge, 1991), 169-193; Pearl, About Faces, 50, 128-145.
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Fig. 4. All of the type cards for noses in Physogs. Image courtesy of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.
“Self-Conscious”; men could be “Dissipated” but women were more likely to be “Pleasant—Cheerful.” It was not surprising that the two cards depicting full, smiling mouths showing teeth could only be attached to female types, recalling an enduring cultural imperative that women smile. The most superficially attractive features and faces were associated with positive character traits, whereas the less attractive features—unsymmetrical, coarser, and wrinkled—signaled less savory types. In this, Physogs was pure physiognomy, or even fairy tale: with virtue, beauty, and with vice, plainness or even ugliness.
Playing Physogs in 2019 was an imperfect form of experiential history. We four players were not 1930s Britons, and our cultural norms, language, assumptions, and critical lenses were quite different. Yet by the second round of play, we were already learning the visual language and vocabulary of discerning faces. While this might be viewed as mere pattern recognition (and it was), this pattern recognition was, for Penry, precisely the point. By learning to recognize these patterns and build these faces, we were enculturing ourselves to his worldview, learning to associate facial features with character types. The game was teaching us to discern
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Fig. 5. A “Pleasant—Cheerful” face. Image courtesy of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.
and assemble both faces and characters, according to Penry’s model. It is hard to tell how popular this game was, or what lessons 1930s or 1940s players might have learned. Perhaps they would have been as frustrated as we were, and after a few attempts the game was relegated to a dusty closet and forgotten. But whatever the fate of Physogs, Penry—and his peculiar way of looking at faces—was not put on a shelf. Indeed, to the extent to which Penry
appears within the historical record, it is for another innovation: Photofit, a key step in the development of modern facial composite systems used by police.13 By the early 1950s, around the time that Character was republished and Faces premiered, Penry had become an occasional
13
Given alternately as Photofit or Photo-Fit.
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Fig. 6. An “Acquisitive—Shrewd” face. Image courtesy of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.
talking head for British television. After appearing in two BBC programs in which he discussed his method of creating composite faces, Penry’s project caught the attention of the police.14 In 1968,
14 “Aids to Identification—A New Method,” The Police Journal 28, no. 3 (1955): 220229; Jacques Penry, “PHOTO-FIT,” The Police Journal 43, no. 7 (1970): 307-316.
Penry contracted with the British Home Office Police Research and Development Branch to grant the rights to his system for police use, which reciprocated by allowing Penry access to police photographic files.15 From this archive he composed sets of noses,
15
Penry, “PHOTO-FIT,” 307.
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eyes, hairlines, ears, and other features to allow for the construction of new faces within the police frame.16 Penry maintained that his PhotoFit system, though introduced a few years after the comparable American Identikit system, was in fact a “completely original conception, and not a development of any other facial identification system.”17 Indeed, Penry described the development of this concept as a byproduct of his earlier projects: My experiments with this idea resulted in my inventing a card game called PHYSOGS which came on the British market in 1939. PHYSOGS was, however, intended solely as a test of players’ skill in terms of varying kinds of personality and character. While the mechanics were different from PHOTOFIT’s, the principle of feature-assembly with photographs was firmly, if indirectly, established. (It did not occur to me then that this could be used in a police facial identification system.)18 This lineage connecting play and practice was visually selfevident: Photofit images used in warrant posters and newspaper notices from the 1970s had a visible bricolage effect indicating where the facial parts came together, closely mimicking the appearance of a completed Physogs frame card. Penry’s Photofit had a longer shelf life and more robust reception than his books or Physogs. It was rapidly incorporated into the mechanisms of police surveillance, to such an extent that its utility and effects of this system became objects of psychological study through the 1970s by a group of Aberdeen researchers.19 These studies at first glance seemed to validate Penry’s insistence of the psychological and scientific content of his approach, though the results were generally critical. Some findings suggested that physiognomic associations were hard to break, even as the twentieth century came to a close: facial features continued to convey moral meanings, and attractiveness (or the converse) still signaled goodness (or its antithesis).20 Other studies suggested similar problems as those we identified while playing Physogs: noses, for example, were difficult for everyone to tell apart.21 Over
16 On Penry and Photofit, see: Edward Higgs, Identifying the English: A History of Personal Identification 1500 to the Present (London: Continuum, 2011), 128-129; Sarah Kember, Virtual Anxiety: Photography, New Technologies, and Subjectivity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 45-49. 17 Penry, “PHOTO-FIT,” 308. 18 Ibid., 308-9. 19 Graham Davies, Hadyn Ellis, and John Shepherd, “Cue Saliency in Faces as Assessed by the ‘Photofit’ Technique,” Perception 6, no. 3 (1977): 263-269; Hadyn D. Ellis, Graham M. Davies, and John W. Shepherd, “A Critical Examination of the Photofit System for Recalling Faces,” Ergonomics 21, no. 4 (1978): 297-307; Hadyn D. Ellis, Graham M. Davies, and John W. Shepherd, “Remembering Pictures of Real and ‘Unreal’ Faces: Some Practical and Theoretical Considerations,” British Journal of Psychology 69 (1978): 467-474; Hadyn Ellis, John Shepherd, and Graham Davies, “An Investigation of the Use of the Photo-Fit Technique for Recalling Faces,” British Journal of Psychology 66, no. 1 (1975): 29-37; J. W. Shepherd, H.D. Ellis, Mary McMurran, and G. M. Davies, “Effect of Character Attribution on Photofit Construction of a Face,” European Journal of Social Psychology 8 (1978): 263-268; among others. 20 Shepherd et al., “Effect of Character Attribution.” 21 Davies et al., “Cue Saliency,” 268.
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time, the cluster of studies focusing on evaluating Photofit came to identify a series of weaknesses to the system, leading to collaboration between researchers and the Police Science Development Branch to improve the system between the 1970s and 1980s.22 More recently, newer systems have emerged to replace Photofit, though still similar in name, kind, and method.23 Photofit, of course, was not Physogs, and police composites are not an idle game. If nothing else, the scale of Penry’s program expanded widely. The original game only allowed for thirteen “correct” faces corresponding with types, and all faces were ostensibly constructed of white features. Between its introduction in 1970 and 1973, the Photofit database grew, from an original 5.4 billion possible faces for white men alone to 12.9 billion possible white male faces and a new roster of non-white, male faces.24 Yet the concept of the game led to the development of a system that enabled and furthered police surveillance. Even though Penry’s approach was based on old-fashioned physiognomic thinking, it was adapted to become an essential technique of “modern” policing. Thus, seemingly abandoned scientific ideas became incorporated into self-consciously “modern” scientific practices, ensuring their continued influence. The children who grew up constructing faces for fun with Physogs would, as adults, open up The Times to find eerily familiar facial reconstructions peering back at them: a mechanism of play became a tool for policing. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Melissa Grafe at the Medical Historical Library of the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library of Yale University for introducing me to Physogs. This project would not have been possible without Rachel Ingold, Taylor de Klerk, and Brooke Guthrie of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library of Duke University; I appreciate them taking the time to play this game with me. Kelly O’Donnell and Scott DiGiulio provided valuable comments and feedback on this essay.
22 Graham M. Davies and Andrew W. Young, “Research on Face Recognition: The Aberdeen Influence,” British Journal of Psychology 108 (2017); 812-830, on 818-819. 23 Kember, Virtual Anxiety, 49-54. 24 For Asian and African men, the kit boasted 500 million possibilities; a female kit was not developed until 1973. Fowler, Norman, “5,400m-face identity kit,” The Times (London, England), 23 April 1970; “Photofit inventor to make a kit for women,” The Times (London, England), 14 May 1973.
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