This is the first study to explore the connections between late-19th-century university/college composite class portraits and the field of Eugenics ? which first took hold in the United States at Harvard University. Eugenics, 'Aristogenics', Photography takes a closer look at how composite portraiture documented an idealized ?reality? of the New England social-caste experience and explains how, when positioned in relation to the individual stories and portraits of members of the class, the portraits reveal points of non-conformity and rebellion with their own rhetoric.