The Passport in America: The History of a Document (15 page)

However, the complexity of the emergence of the passport as a modern identification technology is evident in the return of a designated space for distinguishing marks in the twentieth century. The twentieth-century passport developed as a document required in the name of national security. Unlike its NineteenthCentury relative, the priority of this passport at the border was the identification of suspect individuals such as Bolsheviks and aliens who sought to avoid immigration laws. Although after 1914 U.S. passports contained a photograph of the bearer the retooled physical description remained on the passport to help a suspicious official establish that a photograph had not been altered or substituted; the U.S. government no longer thought of its passports as a courtesy document for travelers. Therefore, any concessions to privilege disappeared as all parts of the body became appropriate objects for the gaze of officials. In fact, all aspects of a person’s identity came to be viewed as potentially valuable to what was now viewed as a useful and necessary act of identification. In deference to the international standardization of the passport, U.S. officials added “occupation” as a category in the description of the bearer.
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5
Photograph

On 21 December 1914, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan issued an order requiring two unmounted photographs no larger than three inches by three inches to be submitted with passport applications—one attached to the application, the second to be put on the passport.
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Citizens who had been issued passports without photographs were required to have a photograph added. Photographs were introduced to make the passport a more accurate identification document in a time of war.
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The use of the passport in the name of national security also brought with it an increased concern to make the document more secure. Less than a month after adding photographs to passports, the State Department acknowledged the need to more effectively ensure that the correct photograph was connected to the correct document. When applications were submitted to local courthouses, clerks were now requested to affix photographs to the application with a seal to avoid subsequent substitution of the photograph prior to the issuance of a passport.
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In Washington and at embassies around the world, officials stamped the seal of their office over the top left corner of the photograph when they attached it to the passport instead of the initial practice of simply pasting it to the document. A rubber stamp was also introduced to apply a legend across the photograph. In addition to being an attempt to secure the passport, the legend made explicit the purpose of the photograph and the authority that legitimized the identification process. The legend stated: “This is to certify that the photograph attached hereto is a likeness of the person to whom this passport is issued. In witness whereof the seal of the Department
of State is impressed upon the photograph.” In 1928, as part of continuing attempts to make the passport a more secure document, the State Department began to use a machine that perforated a legend across the lower part of the photograph after it was attached to a passport. This made it more difficult for someone to cleanly remove the photograph, and it was assumed to be more difficult to replicate than the rubber stamp.
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All of this effort was necessary because officials considered the photograph to be an authoritative likeness of a person—hence their concern that a substituted photograph would allow someone to easily claim the citizenship and identity the state had intended for someone else. The concern with fraud led officials to employ the relatively less “accurate” identification technologies of the signature and the physical description to further ensure the photograph on the passport was indeed that of the person the State Department had issued the passport to. Officials reduced the categories in the physical description to height, hair, and eyes, but as noted retained the recently added category for “distinguishing marks.” From 1924 applicants had to sign the back of the passport photograph. According to a State Department publication, this signature “provided a written record to identify the rightful bearer in the passport, reduced the possibility of fraud, and insured that the proper photograph was attached to the application and the passport.”
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During the 1920s the State Department also clarified its policy to ensure that all passports carried a photograph of the bearer. In 1921 the secretary of state ruled that applicants had to provide a photograph regardless of religious beliefs; this was in response to an applicant intending to travel abroad as a missionary who had quoted Exodus 20:4 against the making of graven images to support his belief that he should not have to provide a photograph.
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At the end of the decade the State Department issued a requirement that all infants had to have a photograph on a passport.
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The department also sought to stop its officials, both at home and abroad, from accepting photographs that did not satisfy the increasingly specific requirements: thin paper, light background, and dimensions between 2.5 inches by 2.5 inches and 3 inches by 3 inches.
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The passport photograph, if it adhered to this particular form, was considered to produce a “truthful” image that could be used to reliably link a person to a passport and thus accurately establish an individual’s identity. The promise to deliver accurate identification was based in a faith in the mechanical reproduction of the camera over the lingering subjectivity of the written physical description. It is therefore important to
establish how the photograph came to be considered an objective, trustworthy technology that satisfied the new modern criteria for reliability in official identification. It is equally important to recognize that this visual authority was contested, both implicitly and explicitly. The “truth” that state officials granted the passport photograph in documenting a person’s face and thus their identity coexisted with a public perception of what a newspaper called the “distortion of passport photography.”
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This “distortion” was the product of the clashing of two particular traditions of photographing people: the portrait and the “scientific” image (generally used in criminal identification photographs). Most passport applicants associated representational truth with the specific articulation of realism in photographic portraits. This association gave rise to complaints that a standardized passport photograph was unflattering, and in fact did not look like the bearer. From the inception of passport photographs, people experienced “a pang of horrid surprise, almost disbelief, upon first looking at the photograph which [was] to identify them in a foreign country;”
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at least according to a
New York Times
editorial from 1930 (which will be discussed in detail below.)

In the nineteenth century photography developed rapidly from the unique image of the daguerreotype in the 1840s to the arrival of the first Kodak handheld cameras in the 1880s. While this involved numerous technical advances, including a move from wet plates to dry plates and the introduction of flexible film and faster lenses, throughout this period most people encountered photography in one form—portraits. In the United States portraits were produced in the form of the phenomenally successful daguerreotype and the subsequently popular carte de visite. The former produced a unique picture directly onto a polished silver-coated plate; made as a positive image without a negative, it was extremely fragile and therefore was kept in a protective case like a piece of jewelry. The latter was a photographic visiting card 2½ by 4 inches that arrived once paper prints could be produced from glass negatives. Early histories of photography cited these particular forms as evidence that photographs democratized portraiture; images of individuals were made available to members of the lower classes who had not been able to have painted portraits. The simple facts of the arrival of the daguerreotype can be read to support this claim. In the 1840s it became the most successful commercial concern in the United States, with people spending $8–12
million a year on daguerreotypes; by the mid-1850s, with the fad subsiding a little, an estimated three million daguerreotypes were still produced, selling at two for twenty-five cents (making them more expensive that the new paper prints that had recently emerged).
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More recent histories of photography have argued that although such numbers indicate that the ability to access a portrait had permeated the population, this supposed democratization of representation arrived as a commodity to secure developing class relations and in the form of a portrait style that, it is argued, transmitted bourgeois values.
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While this argument developed in debates about the extent to which a recognition of resistance and multiple uses can challenge the power of the state and the market, it is the claim to “likeness” in the development of the photographic portrait style that is of primary importance to the history of photography as an identification technology.

A discussion in the early issues of the New York Camera Club magazine about the relationship between art and photography highlights an important distinction in early photographic portrait practices—namely, between “photographic likeness” and “photographic portrait.” This debate from the late 1890s drew on popular physiognomic understandings of the relationship between the surface of the body and interior identity or true character.
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The “likeness” was an image almost entirely associated with physical attributes that apparently enabled only a perfunctory identification. In contrast, it was argued that a more accurate representation could be elicited if photographers followed the conventions of portraiture. This accuracy lay in the successful capturing of “the imprint of the subject’s personality.”
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True “resemblance” was thus not due to any specific insights on the part of the camera, nor was it to be found on the surface of the body. Rather, it was due to the discursive construction of the body as a portrait, which the camera could then merely represent. Cultural historian Alan Trachtenberg has argued that the portrait as a camera image was made to “resemble a resemblance, to give an effect of likeness” achieved “only under controls (focus, framing, lighting) derived from a formula of likeness” taken from an adjacent formal system of representation in portraiture.
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Posture and expression were critical to the construction of this “likeness”; it has been argued that this arrangement of head and hands needs to be understood through the typologies of physiognomy.
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In the United States the earliest and most infamous example of the articulation of the physiognomic appeal of photography to class and national identity was Matthew Brady’s portraits of “illustrious Americans.” These were images of people in three-quarter profile looking away from the viewer.
Brady exhibited his daguerreotypes of famous Americans in New York in the 1850s and 1860s before selecting twelve portraits for a print edition called
The Gallery of Illustrious Americans
.
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As the nineteenth century progressed another style of gallery became equally famous—the rogues’ gallery that made photographs of criminals available to the public with great success as a form of entertainment. By the 1880s these images were circulated more widely, such as in
Professional Criminals of America
, a book written by the chief detective of the New York City police.
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In comparison with Brady’s
Gallery
the distinction between “portrait” and “likeness” in the rogues’ gallery becomes a stark division between the artistic and technical. This new “juridical photographic realism” drew from the imperatives of medical and anatomical illustration rather than the traditions of portraiture.
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These photographs, stripped of the accoutrements of the portrait in the name of a “scientific” rigor, produced the image of the head-on stare, which was in direct contrast to the cultivated asymmetries of a portrait pose.
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As photography was more fully recruited into the policing of criminals, it is possible to make a further distinction between the “technical” and the “scientific.” While each approach turned on the relationship between individual and group/species, they sought to reveal a different aspect. The technical was the particular image of the mug shot, used to identify a specific individual. But photography was also employed to define the generalized look of the criminal. As criminology emerged to produce a typology of criminals, photographs were used to define the generalized appearance of these types. This occurred most prominently in the work of Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin. In the 1870s, before he moved on to develop eugenics, Galton used photographs of individuals to produce composite images of criminal types.
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Although different in intention, the scientific and the technical collectively created a culture of photographic documentation, which art historian John Tagg describes as one of “precision, measurement, calculation and proof, separating out its objects of knowledge, shunning emotional appeal and dramatization, and hanging its status on technical rules and protocols whose institutionalization had to be negotiated.”
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