Ivy League nude posture photos

[MarlowBunny]

"The Ivy League nude posture photos were taken in the 1940s through the 1970s of all incoming freshmen at certain Ivy League and Seven Sisters colleges, ostensibly to gauge the rate and severity of rickets, scoliosis, and lordosis in the population.[1][2] The project was run by William Herbert Sheldon and E.A. Hooton who may have been using the data to support their theory on body types and social hierarchy."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League_nude_posture_photos
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/15/magazine/the-great-ivy-league-nude-posture-photo-scandal.html

"The procedure did seem strange. But I soon learned that it was a long-established custom at most Ivy League and Seven Sisters schools. George Bush, George Pataki, Brandon Tartikoff and Bob Woodward were required to do it at Yale. At Vassar, Meryl Streep; at Mount Holyoke, Wendy Wasserstein; at Wellesley, Hillary Rodham and Diane Sawyer. All of them -- whole generations of the cultural elite -- were asked to pose."

"Ah, yes, the famous rumored stolen Vassar posture pictures," Nora Ephron (Wellesley '62) recalled when I spoke with her. "But don't forget the famous rumored stolen Wellesley posture photos."

"Wellesley too?"

"Oh, yes," she said. "It's one of those urban legends."

She can laugh about it now, she said, but in retrospect the whole idea that she and all her smart classmates went along with being photographed in this way dismays her. "We were idiots," she said. "Idiots!"

Sally Quinn (Smith '63), the Washington writer, expressed alarm when I first reached her. "God, I'm relieved," she said. "I thought you were going to tell me you found mine. You always thought when you did it that one day they'd come back to haunt you. That 25 years later, when your husband was running for President, they'd show up in Penthouse."

Another Wellesley alumna, Judith Martin, author of the Miss Manners column, told me she's "appalled in retrospect" that the college forced this practice on their freshmen. "Why weren't we more appalled at the time?"

 

[TE999]

Now it's the TSA taking the photos while it's checking great-grandma's Depends for concealed weapons.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

What a hysterical article! Ivy League, I actually could believe. Those Boston Brahmin types always have considered themselves aristocrats but the University of California '61 and '67? Amazing. At least at UC Riverside no one seems to have come up with such a silly idea. We had to find our own silly ideas . . .

 

[Boxlicker101]

"The Ivy League nude posture photos were taken in the 1940s through the 1970s of all incoming freshmen at certain Ivy League and Seven Sisters colleges, ostensibly to gauge the rate and severity of rickets, scoliosis, and lordosis in the population.[1][2] The project was run by William Herbert Sheldon and E.A. Hooton who may have been using the data to support their theory on body types and social hierarchy."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League_nude_posture_photos
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/15/magazine/the-great-ivy-league-nude-posture-photo-scandal.html

"The procedure did seem strange. But I soon learned that it was a long-established custom at most Ivy League and Seven Sisters schools. George Bush, George Pataki, Brandon Tartikoff and Bob Woodward were required to do it at Yale. At Vassar, Meryl Streep; at Mount Holyoke, Wendy Wasserstein; at Wellesley, Hillary Rodham and Diane Sawyer. All of them -- whole generations of the cultural elite -- were asked to pose."

"Ah, yes, the famous rumored stolen Vassar posture pictures," Nora Ephron (Wellesley '62) recalled when I spoke with her. "But don't forget the famous rumored stolen Wellesley posture photos."

"Wellesley too?"

"Oh, yes," she said. "It's one of those urban legends."

She can laugh about it now, she said, but in retrospect the whole idea that she and all her smart classmates went along with being photographed in this way dismays her. "We were idiots," she said. "Idiots!"

Sally Quinn (Smith '63), the Washington writer, expressed alarm when I first reached her. "God, I'm relieved," she said. "I thought you were going to tell me you found mine. You always thought when you did it that one day they'd come back to haunt you. That 25 years later, when your husband was running for President, they'd show up in Penthouse."

Another Wellesley alumna, Judith Martin, author of the Miss Manners column, told me she's "appalled in retrospect" that the college forced this practice on their freshmen. "Why weren't we more appalled at the time?"

They weren't appalled at the time because nudity for the purpose of a physical exam was a normal thing, and the photos, taken so a physician could examine them more closely, would have seemed reasonable. Now, knowing how easily such a photo can find its way to the internet, those people would probably not be so willing.

It was a pretty dumb idea though, even then, and they should have let the subjects keep their faces concealed.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

. . . they should have let the subjects keep their faces concealed.

Damned straight!

 

[Pure]

notes

Marlow, this is actually quite an old story. here are a couple of the dozens of articles. the NY Times article you mention was in 1995, as is the SF Gate article whose url, I give below. The second quotation is from the Vassar Encyclopedia, about 2005.

Box, of course is pretty confused about the project, its purposes, and the objections to it:

box They weren't appalled at the time because nudity for the purpose of a physical exam was a normal thing, and the photos, taken so a physician could examine them more closely, would have seemed reasonable. Now, knowing how easily such a photo can find its way to the internet, those people would probably not be so willing.
---

pure: They were NOT used to further a physical exam, but to document 'posture', an obsession at the time, and body type, which according to the investigator, Sheldon (an anthropologist), was (said to be) linked with intelligence, as was race, of course. After their discovery, in the 70s, at universities such as Yale and Wellesley, the thousands of photos, everyone in the incoming classes, for several periods of history (1940s,50s, part of 60s) were shredded and burned; the 'science' behind these alleged bits of 'scientific data' having been discredited.

http://articles.sfgate.com/1995-01-...ape-and-intelligence-yale-university-students

http://vcencyclopedia.vassar.edu/athletics/posture-and-photographs.html

According to MacCracken, the college president, photography was an important improvement, as it is "...through visual records the student may see his progress and gain incentive to go on."
Although most elite eastern colleges took posture photographs in the mid-twentieth century, the procedures varied from school to school. As Professor Elizabeth Daniels described the method at Vassar: "In your freshman year you went over to the gym, Kenyon, where Professor Ruth Timm had set up a pro-tem photo booth. You changed into an angel-robe before entering the booth, shed the robe temporarily while your nude profile and rear views of your body were recorded, put the angel robe back on, and left... Ruth Timm analyzed the results with you and the two of you were going to work to improve your deficiencies. [...]

However, it was clearly still quite problematic. While evaluating someone's body and outlining an exercise program to improve it is quite similar to the work of a trainer today, trainers rarely employ nude photographs.

====
The most disturbing mystery surrounding the Vassar posture photographs lies in their alleged connection to William H. Sheldon, an anthropologist at Columbia in the 1940's and 50's. Rosenbaum, researching college posture photographs, linked the nude posture photos to those Sheldon used in his research: a rather disturbing allegation. By taking thousands of nude photographs and collecting them into an "Atlas of Men" and an "Atlas of Women," Sheldon was attempting to mathematically interpret the proportions of the human body. Rosenbaum noted that he divided "...human beings into three types - skinny, nervous "ectomorphs," fat and jolly "endomorphs;" confident, buffed "mesomorphs." [...] In other words, the measurements of a person's body would reveal and indeed determine everything from their personality to future success. As a racist who claimed that African Americans stopped developing intellectually at the age of ten, there is some evidence that he intended to use his catalogues of nude photographs to prove the racial superiority of the white upper and middle class populations.