Our Faces, Our Selves
Self portraits via the police Identi-Kit
by Giles Revell, Matt Willey and Matthew McKinnon
Thomas King, Author/Politician:
I'm like anybody else. I look at myself and I hope I look good. But I think what we do is we look at ourselves, and we try to imagine somebody else that we've seen, maybe a movie star or someone else who looks a little bit like us. For whatever reason, the past three or four years, as I'm wandering the streets of Toronto, people want to know if I'm James Coburn. I don't see the resemblance at all. And James Coburn is dead.
I look more like my father, although I have some of my mother's features. I thought I had just one brother, and then I discovered, when I was about fifty, that my father had been a busy boy, and that I had seven other half-brothers and half-sisters. We didn't know about each other. When I was about two years old, my father took off.
My brother looks more like my mother. We say I got the native side of the gene bank and Christopher got the Greek side, because Christopher has hair all over his body and nothing on his head, and I have no hair on my body but I have all of my hair left on my head. He's younger than I am, so I say that's the benefit he gets out of this. He could grow a moustache when he was eighteen. I couldn't grow one until I was forty. I eventually got to the point where I could grow a decent moustache. Then I looked like a Mexican.
About two and a half years ago, I had some real health problems. I was overweight and eating badly. I discovered I had Type 2 diabetes. I didn't want to go on medication, so I went on a very strict diet and lost sixty pounds over the course of six or seven months. That changed the whole struc-ture of my face and body and put me over into a different age group.
The use of composite drawings based on eyewitness accounts for identifying criminals has its origins in the nineteenth century, but the first commercially available system — one not dependent upon the skills of trained forensic artists — was Identi-Kit, introduced by the Townsend Corporation in the US in 1959.
The original Identi-Kit consisted of a series of transparent cards, or foils, on which different types of facial features and accessories were drawn, arranged in a simple wooden box. To assemble a likeness to descriptions provided by witnesses, a police officer or witness would have a broad variety of eyes, noses, lips, ears, foreheads, jaws, and so forth to mix and match, one on top of the other. After the system was purchased in the late 1960s by the legendary gun manufacturer Smith & Wesson, a new version of Identi-Kit emerged that used photographic foils to render the choice of features more precise and realistic. More recently, mechanical composite drawing kits like Identi-Kit have been replaced by specially designed software.
The version of Identi-Kit used in the current project has photographic foils and was used by the rcmp beginning in 1976. The severe limitations of this method of creating composites for identifying criminals is evident. The forty or so types of each individual feature in the kit have little hope of reflecting the infinite nuances of the human face, and indeed research suggests that Identi-Kit makes it more difficult for witnesses to identify criminals. (Today the
rcmp relies on sketches by trained forensic artists.) But when applied to oneself in the form of a self-portrait, it can be revealing of the way a person sees his or her self and appearance.
BONUS: View five more Identi-Kit portraits in our
online-only gallery.
Twelve Canadians were photographed, asked to construct self-portraits using Identi-Kit, and then interviewed about their experiences of the process and themselves. The result is a study in the complexity and conflictedness of identity, of the subtle disjunctions between how we look from the outside and how we think of ourselves from the inside.
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Francesco Sinibaldi: An evidence for you.
When everything
shines in the
light of October
there's a beautiful
seaside, and a
careful watcher: the
sun fades away,
and even a
strange man
arrives near a
fountain.
Francesco Sinibaldi September 20, 2008 12:29 EST