Photographic Passport Biometry

Abstract

When ICAO approved a new standard for international passports, they recommended including a high-resolution facial image on a chip in addition to the visual portrait on the identity page. Accordingly, there is, in a certain sense, two images in the current passport, one on the chip, the other visually displayed. In this article I relate the functional distribution between these two images to the nineteenth-century mugshot and argue that the photographically generated images in the current passport represent a subdued tension between two parallel paths in the history of photography: depiction and measurement. By looking at the arguments for facial recognition technologies in today's passport as specified by ICAO, I argue that the current regulation of international mobility downplays the importance of physical measurements and hides this behind photography’s more familiar function, namely depiction. This contributes to conceal biometrics as a tool for power and control in today’s society.

The Intrinsic Value of Valuable Paper: On the Infrastructural Work of Authentication Devices

“…The prevalent use of symbolic and nationalistic imagery (Gilbert, 1998;Hawkins, 2010;Lauer, 2008;Weatherford, 1997), for example, provides insight into the historical, social, and political systems in which they circulate. In identification documents like passports, attention has also been placed on elements like signatures, photographs, and fingerprints (Cole, 2002;Fahrmeir, 2001;Hausken, 2020;Robertson, 2012), all of which eventually become regulated with strict standardization protocols. Valuable papers also contain a variety of other techniques.…”