To comply with a recent law that restricts how Californian law agencies can share photos and mug shots of suspected criminals, one police force is placing Lego heads on suspects to conceal their identities.
A police photo album from the Victorian era that features criminal mugshots will go to auction after it was saved from a dumpster.
I’m Nick Harris, a photo restorer and colourizer at Photo Restoration Services. I take immense pride in my work and the preservation of memories for future generations. I’d love to share a recent project of mine, of colorized Victorian prisoner mugshots.
French criminologist (and high school dropout) Alphonse Bertillon was a pioneer in the field of anthropometry – the use of human measurements – to identify criminals. As a part of this practice, Bertillon standardized the modern mugshot in 1888 with the now familiar frontal and profile portrait, the latter of which was selected because Bertillon believed the ears to be a highly identifiable characteristic.
In 1871, the Prevention of Crimes Act made it a legal requirement that anybody who was arrested in England and Wales had to have their photograph taken—thus was born the official "mug shot". But mug shots from the late 1800s look very different from the ones you might see today.
Turns out you may not have to be stupid enough to post incriminating evidence on Instagram to get busted via photo in the near future. A pair of British researchers are working on a way to collect identifiable images from the reflections of people captured on a photo subject's eyeball.