Ella Fitzgerald's passport, by Unidentified photographer, 1959, National Museum of American History, Behring Center, Archives Center.
Why? Because as more states follow the lead of Arkansas, Indiana, Nevada, and Virginia, anything other than a neutral expression throws off new facial recognition software that compares new photo ID pictures with previously existing ones. The technology, designed to increase security and reduce fraud, “works best when the images are similar,” said a Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles spokeswoman, Pam Goheen, quoted in a recent Washington Post report. So if you find yourself online at the DMV when the old song “Put on a Happy Face” pops up in your head, don’t.
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Wonder what the effect of Botox treatments have on facial recognition software.
Maybe, as photo ID data banks and surveillance systems are more seamlessly integrated, all bodily modifications will need to be reported to the authorities and enhancement seekers will have to file updated photographs. We’ve come a long way from the days when Hollywood glamour photographers and cinematographers applied smeared a dab of Vaseline on a lens to make people look smooth and wrinkle-free.
No one seemed to smile in early photographs. There has always been much debate about why no one appeared to be very happy in early photographs. Was it painful to sit so long in one position to hold a pose for the long exposures needed by the camera? Were people fearful of a new technology? Was the process of being photographed so forbidding that it was an altogether unpleasant experience? Or did a smile suggest something uncontrollable or suspect about a person? Or did it take the experience of looking at yourself photographed to realize that you needed to do something to change the expression on your face?
I’m not sure when a smile became desirable in a photographic portrait — when was that? But certainly by the 1940s or early 50s, when a family would trek down to the local Sears to have their picture taken (maybe by Arnold Newman), smiling became the pose of choice. I don’t think it was because people wanted to look happy, but rather they just wanted to be memorialized in a way acceptable to the times. The photographer wouldn’t ask the subject to think of their Uncle Lou with spaghetti sauce on his tie — trying to evoke a humorous memory, but rather would just ask the subject to say, “Cheese” to artificially create a smile. They were acting, just not method acting.