Camera Clues: A Handbook for Photographic Investigation

4. Photography and Identification

4 PHOTOGRAPHY AND IDENTIFICATION Since their invention, photographs have naturally been associated with identification. In this chapter we will look first at the use of photographs as an aid to identification, primarily by law enforcement personnel, and then at the need to identify the subjects of old photographs, a frequent challenge to the photo detective. Photographs for Identification Purposes History of identification. Descriptions of wanted criminals were employed during the reign of the pharaohs in Egypt, as elsewhere throughout antiquity. In fact, before the advent of photographs and fingerprints, detectives usually had to rely on memory-theirs or that ofsomeone else. According to a history of the London police force: "Criminals gave as many false names as possible, and travelled over the country by rail, committing offences in many places. A man might be caught in one place and treated as a first offender, even though he had 'done time' for robberies elsewhere. A useful way of identifying a suspect was to ask a policeman who might have arrested him earlier if he recognized the man. Detectives would go to a prison specially to see men being released, and would try to memorize their appearance." 1 The first really scientific attempt at identification of criminals was made in 1860 by a Belgian prison warden named Stevens, who began taking measurements of criminals' heads, ears, feet, lengths of bodies, and so forth. His imperfect method was abandoned, but by 1882 a Frenchman, Alphonse Bertillon (1853-1914), had developed an elaborate anthropometrical system that involved tabulating height, sitting height, length of outstretched arms, length and breadth of head, length of right ear, and other measurements. 70 CAMERA CLUES Bertillon supplemented his system with such additional data as scars and eye color, plus full-face and profile photographs.2 Eventually fingerprinting replaced bertillonage. Although fingerprints had apparently seen limited use for personal identification in ancient Babylonia and China, it was not until about 1860 that they began to be used on a consistent basis. A British colonial official in India, William Herschel, started including handprints of the natives on their contracts to deter forgeries and the refutation of signatures. Other developments came in time: in 1881, Henry Faulds, a Scottish medical missionary in Japan, wrote that finger impressions left at the scene of a crime could identify the perpetrator; in 1892, Sir Francis Galton authored the first textbook on fingerprinting; and by 1910 fingerprints were in widespread use in the United States.3 Although fingerprinting became the mainstay of identification and Bertillon's cumbersome system was relegated to little more than a historical footnote, his descriptive portrait parle (or "word picture" telling height, weight, color of hair and eyes, and so forth) and "mug" photos have remained very much in use. Also, because (as with fingerprints) no two things in nature are exactly alike, many other methods of identification have served on occasion, including lip impressions, dental X rays, and certain features that may show in photographs, such as distinctive front teeth, unique scar patterns, and ear configurations (treated at length later in this chapter). Although some of these methods are relatively rarely employed, that does not lessen their validity in cases in which they can be used. "Mug" shots. Some police departments recognized the value of photographs in identifying known criminals in the early 1840s (notably in Belgium as early as 1843) and files ofdaguerreotypes were maintained by police in France, Belgium, and the United States during the 1850s.4 The ability to produce multiple prints from negatives greatly facilitated the use of "mug shots" (the slang term for face having possibly derived from the eighteenthcentury custom of fashioning drinking mugs in the form ofgrotesque human faces5 ). Although the multiple mug prints were not intended for public distribution , they were occasionally sent to police departments in other cities. Apparently they were made in carte de visite format, like one illustrated in William C. Darrah's Cartes de Visite in Nineteenth Century Photography, which has the prisoner's identification number "1025" imprinted at the upper left. It came from a dispersed police file in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1883. Sometimes, portraits of well-known criminals were produced commercially by enterprising photographers, but these should be distinguished from the mug prints per se.6 PHOTOGRAPHY AND IDENTIFICATION 71 As mentioned earlier, mug photographs were included with Bertillon's anthropometrical system ofidentification, and London police began to build up their "rogues gallery" (a reference...