Like the presidential portrait, the mug shot’s history begins as early as the 1840s, when prisoners in Belgium were photographed so they could be identified if they committed crimes after their sentences ended. Over the following decades, police departments around the world began experimenting with ways to incorporate photography into their work. In the U.S., police created rogues’ galleries of mug shots, sometimes even publishing them and encouraging upstanding citizens to keep a watchful eye out for troublemakers.
The practice, however, didn’t become standardized until the 1880s, when Alphonse Bertillon, chief of criminal identification for the Paris police, streamlined the process.
Bertillon’s mug shot consisted of two photographs—one facing the camera, the other in profile—attached to a written description of physical features and certain measurements, such as the size of someone’s ear or foot. Together, these elements were called a portrait parlé, or “speaking image.”
“Bertillon designed the portrait parlé in an effort to catch masters of disguise who committed crimes under different aliases,” wrote Shawn Michelle Smith in the journal Aperture in 2018. “He proposed that although a repeat offender might conceal his identity, one would be able to discover him if his physical measurements matched those of ‘another’ offender already recorded.”
In 1908, the New York City Police Department compiled a series of images showing how to properly take a mug shot and the accompanying measurements. According to Smith, some of these images even “simulate people who refuse to sit for their mug shots and are wrestled into submission before the camera by multiple men, suggesting that not all subjects would be amenable to these extensive measurements.”
Soon after, “Bertillon’s method of recording anthropometric data lost out to the more reliable process of fingerprinting,” wrote Slate’s Julia Felsenthal in 2010.
The mug shot, however, endured.
“Whenever you go through an airport or … a train station … and somebody asks to see your identification document, that all has roots in the late 1800s and the work of people like Bertillon and his contemporaries,” Jonathan Finn, a police photography expert, told NPR’s Hansi Lo Wang in 2016.