The Passport in America: The History of a Document (16 page)

The acceptance of photographic authority also occurred gradually in other areas. In the world of science the photograph emerged to challenge the scientific drawing. While the quality of early photographic images was often less visually accurate than that of scientific drawing, photographs were seen as being more reliable, as their automated image was understood to eliminate any chance of suspect human mediation. The faith in this new “mechanical
objectivity” put a new preference for automation over precision at the forefront of the creation of the scientific image. This definition of reliability, grounded in moral terms as the exclusion of the scientist’s will, produced the early trust in the photographic image over and above individual actions.
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In U.S. courtrooms the claim that photographs provided accurate evidence was not as readily accepted. At the beginning of the twentieth century, photographs had become a routine evidentiary tool in the courtroom, but this only occurred through a complicated and not entirely consistent process.
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The legal debate over the authority of photography illustrated the two paradigmatic understandings of photography: as objective machine-made truth (“a mirror with memory,”
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as Oliver Wendell Holmes famously put it) and as artifice (the product of human agency and skill). While supporters believed in the accuracy of a photographic image, the photograph came to be accepted as legal evidence on the grounds that it only “might” be a true depiction.

Prior to the middle of the nineteenth century, words constituted most of the evidence in a courtroom. By the 1870s, although photographs were frequently used to prove identity in criminal cases, they remained such a novelty in the courtroom that lawyers often contested the authority of photographs. The photograph officially entered the courtroom, along with maps and diagrams, as an example of “illustrative evidence.” A photograph was thus understood to be open to dispute. As illustrative evidence it was not independent evidence, and therefore a witness had to authenticate the image and confirm it was an accurate representation before it could be used. That is, judgment as to the truth of visual representation was identical to the assessment of the veracity of any witness. However, the power of the photographic image was such that, when used in courtrooms, photographs became more than mere illustrations. They trumped other visual tools as the idea of a photograph as an unmediated image of reality permeated the courtroom; if not official evidence, photographs were at least an increasingly compelling, independently persuasive form of proof. Therefore, through contested claims to truth, photographs entered the courtroom as a legal fiction—”a formal rule that coexisted with a reality that contradicted it.”
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The competing understandings of photographs as unmediated depictions or constructed artifacts meant the “reliability” of photography did not arrive
uncontested. While a common result saw photographs viewed as dependable and objective, this outcome was the product of debate and negotiation that both purposely and inadvertently exposed the precise terms under which photography could be seen to accurately represent the world. In the development of identification documentation in the United States, the enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Acts provides an early example of how this negotiation over the authority of the photographic image often originated in an initial blind faith in photographs to document the “truth.” The addition of photographs to the identification documents used to verify Chinese who were exempt from the act was the first example of government-issued photographic identification in the United States.
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Photographs were added to prevent potential Chinese immigrants from selling, exchanging, or creating fraudulent documents. They were initially considered to provide an accurate representation as they came from the camera, not from Chinese, who were not trusted to truthfully represent themselves through documents. However, most Chinese who sought entry to the United States exercised some control over their photographic representation. In this way they maintained a more active involvement in their representation than officials intended. For at least the first fifteen years in which photographs were required, Chinese regularly submitted their own photographs with few official guidelines—and it was not until 1926 that regulations specified a uniform photographic size or pose, at which point they codified what had become standard practice.
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The limited requirements were that a photograph should not be retouched or mounted, and it had to accurately represent the face—”1½ inches from base of the hair to the base of the chin.”
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As a result, the submitted photographs ranged from elaborate studio portraits to simple headshots. Subjects stood, sat, faced the camera, or looked to the side. While most wore Chinese clothes, some men presented themselves with the markers of Western masculine respectability: suits, ties, and even facial hair. Others adopted a very traditional Chinese cultural appearance. The majority of these images were rectangular vertical portraits, but some had trimmed corners and others were in the shape of arches or ovals.
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The initial lack of official interest in standardizing images stemmed from a simple understanding of the photographic process that led to a belief that because of the mechanical creation of the image there was no suspect mediation in the use of the camera. However, by the end of the nineteenth century most immigration officials had grown more cautious about photography, owing to the recognition that the conditions in which a photograph was
taken could affect the veracity of the image. What skepticism there was about photography was linked to the object of the image. A belief that Chinese were untrustworthy was translated to mistrust of the photographs (and documents) they presented.
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One response to this was to photograph Chinese immigrants as they arrived in San Francisco. In these outdoor shots the person’s face was frequently in shadow and less clear than in the photographs immigrants brought with them. However, these were considered more reliable, as the production of the image had been taken out of Chinese hands.

Two decades after Congress required photographs on Chinese identification documents, the State Department introduced a similar requirement for passports. In the 1920s, with the country no longer in a wartime state of emergency, citizens began to speak out against required passports. The passport photograph became a focal point for these middle-class and upper-class concerns about demands to prove personal identity through official documents and official photographs. The stark frontal image of the passport photograph revealed the unease that many travelers felt towards a required passport. For these travelers this style of photograph indicated the proper target of identification documents should be populations considered suspect and marginal by those who traveled for leisure. A magazine writer stated with apparent certainty, “No one has ever been known to admit that his passport picture looks like himself and usually it presents him as a candidate for the Rogues’ Gallery or the psychopathic ward.”
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The belief that passport photographs are unflattering is clearly not a recent development. A late-1920s anecdote captures this, describing “the sage reply sent by the editor of a woman’s page to a love-sick damsel who asked if she might know if her sweetheart were really true to her. The answer was: ‘Send him your passport picture, and if he withstands that shock, you can depend upon it he loves you.’ “
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Such sentiments constituted the perception of the “distortion of passport photography” that occupied a
New York Times
editorial in 1930. The editorial was a commentary on an article in the
New York Evening Post
that compared the professional portraits of celebrities with their passport photographs. The
Post
had published the passport photographs of five well-known Americans alongside their professional photographs. The
Times
, in commenting on the exercise, saw in the professional photographs “subjects [who] appear beautiful, amiable, pretty, jolly or generally attractive.” In contrast, “in the line-up of passport evidence they beggar description. A criminal or imbecile cast of countenance is marked in most of them. If the lovely Ethel Barrymore can look ‘like that’ to the eye of any camera, ordinary mortals have no kick coming.”
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It was not the “eye” of any camera that made Ethel Barrymore look like a criminal, an imbecile, or, for that matter, beautiful, but rather differing conventions of visual representation. The “distortion” occurred when a claim to the “mechanical objectivity” of the camera in producing a scientific image encountered the tradition of photography as portraiture. As discussed, the former gave the photograph an important function as an objective, empirical form of visual verification, but the object of the passport photograph—a person—produced expectations of the latter style of representation. The perception of passport photographs as depictions of the criminal or the insane was the result of the association of an untouched image of a person’s face staring straight at the camera in front of a light background with images of members of suspect populations. In contrast, the coding of the professional photographs as beautiful drew from the tradition of portrait photography specifically its language of poses and the skill or manipulation of the photographer. The less direct pose of the photographic portrait had become an inscription of class and a manifestation of social identity. This is made clear in dancer Isadora Duncan’s 1916 passport, which has a photograph portrait of her sitting on a sofa, illustrating that social status could grant an exemption to requirements then that it apparently could not in the following decade.
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The frontal image of the passport photograph therefore captured the discomfort that many travelers felt toward the increasingly pervasive demands associated with the official documentation of individual identity.

The passport photograph was prepared with the intention of highlighting an individual’s unique facial features as part of an attempt by the state to know its population on an individual basis. The image of a face looking directly at the camera, with no headdress, in front of a light background followed the logic of standardization that underwrote the emergence of modern identification documents. Alphonse Bertillon made one of the first attempts to standardize identification photographs. He stipulated the exact distance of the subject from the camera and created a special chair on which the subjects sat to control their physical position and posture. He also specified the type of lens and introduced the combination of direct frontal and profile angles that have come to characterize mug shots.
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Through practices of standardization, identity was “simplified” to facilitate state officials recognizing and remembering individuals.

Standardized passport photographs emerged in a somewhat ad hoc manner. The style and size of the photographs applicants submitted provided a recurring problem for officials throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s. The State Department often responded to problematic photographs simply by
accepting them, though in 1924 the State Department clarified for its officials that photographs that failed to adhere to the accepted size and paper type would no longer be accepted.
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While this was enforced with increasing rigor in the issuance of passports in the United States, some degree of flexibility remained for consuls who issued passports abroad, at the margins of the U.S. government. Senior officials in Washington simultaneously expressed concern about passports issued abroad and regularly tolerated deviations from the specifications for photographs. In the 1930s the State Department still occasionally issued passports to a family in the primary name of the husband and father as head of the household. In situations where a consul issued such a passport abroad, a group photograph was preferred over individual photographs; until 1930 infants did not need to be photographed.
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These group photographs tended to approximate portraits; they were still taken by a professional photographer in a studio. In one instance, even the requirement of a studio photograph was waived when the demands of U.S. administration reached beyond the realm of commercial photography. The consul in Curaçao (in what was then called the Netherlands West Indies, now the Netherlands Antilles) was allowed to accept family snapshots after it was explained that a visit to a professional photographer would entail considerable expense because the applicant would have to take several days off work to travel with his young child.
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Back in the United States frequent complaints about the cost of passport photographs did not result in the acceptance of snapshots, but neither did they fall on deaf ears. Most photographers advertised a standard rate of seventy-five cents for the three photographs required, but many, after taking a photograph added an additional charge of $3 or $4 for immediate delivery. In the busiest passport agency in the country in New York, following complaints about cost in the early 1930s, the staff only allowed one photographer to advertise in the agency.
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