Today, facial recognition has become a security feature of choice for phones, laptops, passports, and payment apps. It promises to revolutionize the business of targeted advertising and speed the diagnosis of certain illnesses. It makes tagging friends on Instagram a breeze. Yet it is also, increasingly, a tool of state oppression and corporate surveillance. In China, the government uses facial recognition to identify and track members of the Uighur ethnic minority, hundreds of thousands of whom have been interned in “reeducation camps.” In the US, according to The Washington Post, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the FBI have deployed the technology as a digital dragnet, searching for suspects among millions of faces in state driver’s license databases, sometimes without first seeking a court order. Last year, an investigation by the Financial Times revealed that researchers at Microsoft and Stanford University had amassed, and then publicly shared, huge data sets of facial imagery without subjects’ knowledge or consent. (Stanford’s was called Brainwash, after the defunct café in which the footage was captured.) Both data sets were taken down, but not before researchers at tech startups and one of China’s military academies had a chance to mine them.
Woody’s facial-recognition research in the 1960s prefigured all these technological breakthroughs and their queasy ethical implications. And yet his early, foundational work on the subject is almost entirely unknown. Much of it was never made public.
Fortunately, whatever Woody’s intentions may have been that day in 1995, the bulk of his research and correspondence appears to have survived the blaze in his garage. Thousands of pages of his papers—39 boxes’ worth—reside at the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas. Those boxes contain, among other things, dozens of photographs of people’s faces, some of them marked up with strange mathematical notations—as if their human subjects were afflicted with some kind of geometrical skin disease. In those portraits, you can discern the origin story of a technology that would only grow more fraught, more powerful, and more ubiquitous in the decades to come.
Woodrow Wilson Bledsoe—always Woody to everyone he knew—could not remember a time when he did not have to work. He was born in 1921 in the town of Maysville, Oklahoma, and spent much of his childhood helping his father, a sharecropper, keep the family afloat. There were 12 Bledsoe kids in all. Woody, the 10th, spent long days weeding corn, gathering wood, picking cotton, and feeding chickens. His mother, a former schoolteacher, recognized his intelligence early on. In an unpublished essay from 1976, Woody described her as an encouraging presence—even if her encouragement sometimes came from the business end of a peach-tree switch.