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.
Two police officers in Georgia were fired after videos showing them brutally beating a motorist spread like wildfire on social media. A criminal investigation has been initiated over their conduct, and photos of the two officers have emerged in the media.
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.
This tattered old photo album containing a fascinating collection of some 1,500 mugshots taken over one hundred years was recently sold by the Swann Galleries auction house in New York for $10,000.
Back in 2009, award-winning editorial art director and artist Mark Michaelson released his book Least Wanted: A Century of American Mugshots. In it he had compiled more than 10,000 mug shot portraits taken between the 1870s and 1970s. Portraits of the "punks, sneaks, mooks and miscreants" he referred to as the "Least Wanted."
For his portrait series Wanted, London-based photographer Nick Dolding decided to recreate some of the most striking of the mug shots found within Michaelson's book.
Mug shots and airbrushing are both photography-related, but they aren't commonly found together in stories. Not so with some ongoing controversy over in Greece, though. The police there may soon be under investigation after releasing a number of mug shots that appear to have been Photoshopped.
Why would they 'shop photos of suspected criminals, you ask? The claim is that the images were edited to hide injuries that were inflicted by officers during (or after) the arrests.
If you're looking for a bizarre photo concept to try out, and live in a cold snowy environment, look no further than Yorkshire, UK-based photographer Oliver Turpin's Snow Portraits project. Turpin shot a series of self-portraits, but instead of photographing his real face, he captured photos of imprints of his face in snow.
Several mugshot websites -- including Just Mugshots, Busted! Mugshots, Mugshots Online, and MugRemove -- are ringing in the new year with a massive class action law suit. According to NPR, hundreds of people who have been exonerated of all charges and had their records sealed are suing the websites for not only keeping their mugshots up and using them in banner ads, but refusing to take them down and "scrub" them off the Internet unless the victims pay a hefty fee.
Last year there was a minor controversy when the Portland Police Department began posting photos of arrested Occupy protestors to Facebook. It may or may not have been inspired by the PPD, but Pottstown, Pennsylvania newspaper The Pottstown Mercury has begun sharing photographs of wanted individuals through the popular photo sharing service Pinterest.
Earlier this year, a set of mugshots from the 1920s showing Australian criminals made the rounds on the Internet. When art director Michael Jason Enriquez came across this portraits, he was struck by the artsy-ness of the photos. He writes,
There’s a strange connection that draws us into vintage photographs. Seeing doppelgängers (look-a-likes) in old pictures is our brain’s way of linking us to the past. We see what isn’t there - someone recognizable, a family member, maybe a friend, and then there are the ones that bear an uncanny resemblance to modern day celebrities. We’re so used to seeing celebrity faces on our tv, on blogs, and we even know what their mugshots look like. The tacky looking mugshots we have today are in stark contrast to the mugshots taken in the 1920’s. Vintage mugshots have an eerie beauty to them that’s lost in current mugshot photography. What would celebrity mugshots, the ones we’ve become accustomed to seeing on TMZ, look like if instead they were taken in the 1920’s?
Enriquez decided to find out, and created Mugshot Doppleganger, a website to which he posts Photoshopped images of celebrity booking portraits fused with 1920s mugshots.
There was a minor hoopla yesterday after Boing Boing shared that mugshot photos of arrested Occupy Portland protesters were being uploaded by the Portland Police Department to Facebook.