Ivy League nude posture photographs

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The Ivy League nude posture photographs were a series of images created in the mid-twentieth century at certain Ivy League and Seven Sisters colleges in the United States (among others).

Background

From 1880 to 1940, Harvard University's Physical Education Department took nude posture photographs of all entering students.

William Herbert Sheldon, Jr.[1] was an American psychologist and numismatist. He is best known as the founder of the pseudoscientific field of somatotype and constitutional psychology. The ideology attempted to correlate body types with behavior, intelligence, and social hierarchy. Sheldon, alongside Professor E. A. Hooton of the Anthropology Department at Harvard, took over the nude posture photograph program in 1940, adding the somatotyping hypothesis component at that time.

At some point, the program expanded beyond the Ivy League, including some 46,000 individuals photographed at military and medical institutions.

Alt
An illustration of Sheldon's somatotypes from a June 1951 article in Life Magazine. The article, by Robert Coughlan, claimed that "[Sheldon] has shown that character and physique are closely related, and that the first, like the second is to a considerable extent a product of heredity.

Some 18,000 nude photographs of Harvard undergraduates were stored in the Widener Library[2] until around the summer of 1963. At this time, Frederica E. Sigel and three other teenage women were hired to sort through the images by the School of Public Health.

Discovery

In the late 1970s, an unsuspecting employee of Yale University found a cache of hundreds of thousands of nude photographs of young men inside a long-locked room in the Payne Whitney Gymnasium. The employee showed the photographs to the athletic director at the time, Frank Ryan.

Exhibition

The Smithsonian Institution cut off public access to the nude photographs on 20 January 1995. However, at the time, Ildiko P. DeAngelis, assistant general counsel at the Smithsonian, commented that it was too early to determine whether the pictures in question would be destroyed.

Destruction

The first set of Yale University photographs were destroyed shortly after their discovery in the late 1970s. The athletic director, Frank Ryan, called in a document-disposal expect who shredded the images before burning the leftover shreds.

After a request from Yale University, Smithsonian officials shredded more than 100 pounds[3] of photographs on 28 January 1995, representing all material in the National Anthropological Archives which pertained to former Yale students. A Yale representative was present during the destruction process. The Director of the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum at the time, Donald L. Ortner, commented that any historic or scientific value of the pictures "would be minimal."

Notes

  1. ↑ Usually written as W. H. Sheldon.
  2. ↑ The Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library, established in 1915.
  3. ↑ 45.3592 kg.

External Links

References

No adequate sources have been found so far.

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