Methodologies of Research
Bezalel Academy of Arts & Design
Advisor: Naomi Meiri-Dan
Bezalel Academy of Arts & Design
Advisor: Naomi Meiri-Dan
Figure 1 Trevor Paglen, "They Took the Faces from the Accused and the Dead... (SD18)", 2020. Installation view from
“Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI”. Photography by Gary Sexton, Courtesy of the artist, Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco.
“Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI”. Photography by Gary Sexton, Courtesy of the artist, Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco.
Figure 4 Trevor Paglen, “They Took the Faces from the Accused and theDead . . .(SD18),” (detail), 2020. 3,240 silvergelatin prints and pins; Courtesy of the artistand Altman Siegel, San Francisco.Photo by GarySexton.
They Took the Faces from the Accused and the Dead… (SD18) by Trevor Paglen
The iconographical model / Erwin Panofsky
1. Primary or natural subject matter
Pre-Iconographical description
Trevor Paglen’s work, “They Took the Faces from the Accused and the Dead… (SD18)”, (Figure 1-4) features an overwhelming 15 by 13 meter façade of 3,240 individually pinned black and white square-cut portrait photographs. Photographs of men and women are organized side by side in variable but similar dimensions with no spacing between them. Some are in frontal view, some are in side view, and some have both views featured. Several images have black measuring lines or metric squares in their background. The eyes of all of the subjects are blanked out with a white strip. It is unclear who these people are, what they did, why they are grouped together, and what they are trying to convey.
2. Secondary or conventional subject matter
Iconographical analysis in a narrower sense
Iconographical analysis in a narrower sense
Additional examination reveals that these photos are all mugshots. The portrait style, the measuring lines in the background, the side and frontal views, all indicate that these are photos of individuals who have been arrested and have had their mugshot taken.
To better understand the use of mugshots in Paglen’s work, I went back to the 1870’s when the evolution of the mugshot began. Cesare Lombroso, an Italian army doctor, known as the father of criminology and the first criminal anthropologist, was one of the first people in history to use photography to study crime. He believed that criminality was inherited and that criminals have certain identifying facial features. In his view, the shape of the skull, the jaw, the slope of the forehead, the size of the eyes, and the structure of the ears, were all key identifiers of criminal behavior. He founded his premise of the “born criminal” in his book “Criminal Man”, which documented and catalogued an impressive number of criminals and criminal’s facial features (Figure 5). Although Lombroso’s theories were primitive, his research and documentations, spread throughout Europe. They reached Alphonse Bertillon, a Parisian criminologist, who believed measuring and documenting criminals’ physical features can facilitate the identification of repeat offenders. In 1890, Bertillon, who is regarded as the father of forensic photography, proposed launching an anthropometric identification system, that came to be known as the Bertillon system. It consisted of nine body measurements, facial descriptions and identifying marks, along with a frontal and side photograph, now known as the mugshot (Figure 6). His work of documenting, measuring and categorizing criminals revolutionized how photography was used both for police documentation and criminal investigation procedures.