Donald Trump and the powerful history of the mugshot

livemint.com:

Grant made a vain attempt to plead his case—“Hang it, officer, these animals of mine are thoroughbreds, and there is no holding them"—then drove to the station. There, at least, the president avoided the indignity of a mugshot, which would not be widely used until about a decade later. Despite four indictments in the past five months, the 45th president had long managed to evade it, too.

But on August 24th Donald Trump finally had his picture taken by police when he surrenders to authorities in Fulton County, Georgia, charged in connection with his effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election results there. (He denies wrongdoing.) In it, he is seething, with angled eyebrows and a hard stare. The image will join the ranks of celebrity mugshots: famous faces in turns defiant, dejected, drunk, smirking or sulking.

The modern mugshot—a diptych of one front-facing photo and one in profile, accompanied by identifying information—is a French invention. In the 1880s Alphonse Bertillon, a policeman and anthropologist, created the system to catch serial offenders. Upon arrest, a suspect was photographed and measured with a variety of instruments.

The method was painstakingly prescriptive: the correct way to measure the length of the head was outlined in 18 steps. If police suspected they had a repeat offender on their hands, they could use his measurements to find his filed mugshot, should it exist. It was called the portrait parlé, or speaking image, because of the many things it communicated to police.

Bertillon’s measurements have been replaced by fingerprinting, but the mugshot has survived. Some, like great portraits, seem to get at the subject’s core. David Bowie, booked on marijuana charges in 1976, is sharply dressed