Photography is the founding moment of my family’s Australian history. Before they put their feet on the quay, my parents are posed on the deck of their 10 pound passage, smartly dressed, young and anglo-centric. They smile steadily for the camera. The new land lies before them, and a journalist records an image, the promise of immigration. The photographs you see before you have been produced as singular portraits and family composites. Developed by Francis Galton in the 1870’s, the composite photograph was a model of forecasting a family’s physical features. It provides as well, a model of the body’s act of perception in retrieving and assembling singular images of individuals and imagining the similarities binding a family’s physical identity.