Man Posing Naked Holding Branch of a Tree - Edwin Nichol Fallaize Art Print / Canvas

Edwin Nichol Fallaize (1877–1957) was a Jersey-born anthropologist and Honorary Secretary of the Royal Anthropological Institute whose photographic collection became one of the early twentieth century's most complex archives of the human body. Comprising over 1,300 photographs gathered across the first decades of the century, the Fallaize Collection ranges from studio portraits of actresses and athletes to ethnographic studies of men, women, and children across continents. Organized by nationality and classification, it maps the era's intersection of anthropology, body culture, ethnology, and colourism.

Purchased in 1934 by Henry Wellcome, who deposited it at his Historical Medical Museum, the collection carries the unmistakable weight of colonial frameworks — its groupings, language, and taxonomies reflecting the period's entangled ambitions of science and power. Now held at the Wellcome Collection, which acknowledges the racist and hierarchical systems underpinning such early archives, the Fallaize Collection endures as both photographic record and critical provocation — a document of how looking became classifying.