Bertillon invented the ‘mug shot’, which required convicts to pose for a portrait photograph and a profile photograph, both against a plain backdrop with controlled lighting. Photographs were accompanied by five anthropological measurements: The length and breadth of the head, the length of the middle finger, the length of the left foot and. The roots of forensic photography can be traced back to alphonse bertillon, a french police officer and biometrics researcher in the late 19th century. Bertillon is widely recognized for introducing systematic forensic photography, not to mention credited as. In the 1880s, alphonse bertillon, an anthropologist and chief of the judicial identification service of france, invented the mug shot, a doubled photographic portrait focused tightly on the head, with one view facing the camera and the other in profile. From mug shot to surveillance society (minneapolis: University of minnesota press, 2009); And joshua ellenbogen, the reasoned and unreasoned image: The photography of bertillon, galton, and marey (university park: But these images using the mirror represent the beginning of “official” mug shots; Photos taken starting with the prevention of crimes act and running until about the mid 1890s when the. As paper prints of photographs became cheaper to make, the use of mug shots expanded in the united states and europe. In the 1880s, alphonse bertillon, an anthropologist who served as chief of france’s judicial identification services, developed the standardized mug shot. He created the now familiar format of two tight shots of the subject. The mug shot mirror using early photography to trace the evolution of criminal justice. The website, a online classifieds platform, has fundamentally transformed the way people engage with their neighborhoods. I have decided to use mugshot instead of “mug shot” because, although it is used on both ways, the first seems to be more common. In a new york times (nyt) online search from 1851 to the present, mugshot is used for the first time in 1955; Two years earlier than “mug shot”, and 2700 times versus 803. The term ‘mug shot’ to describe a portrait of a criminal seems to have first been used in the united states in the early 20th century. The word ‘mug’ has a much longer history, having been used as slang for a face since the early 18th century. Capturing the criminal image traces how the act of representing—and watching—is central to modern law enforcement. Jonathan finn analyzes the development of pol.