Our Faces, Our Selves
Self portraits via the police Identi-Kit
by Giles Revell, Matt Willey and Matthew McKinnon
Nina Arsenault, Entertainer:
I've had about sixty cosmetic surgeries and procedures, half of them on my face. I've had five nose jobs. I had a procedure where they pulled the inside of my mouth to the outside of my face, and that's actually my lips. I've had my eyebrows lifted, my chin refined, my jaw shaved, my ears tucked back.
I've spent about $160,000 on cosmetic surgery, or maybe $170,000, I've lost track. I was making money in the sex busi-ness — I'm a retired call girl now. I used to be a university instructor. My colleagues thought I was crazy to enter the sex business, but I didn't think I could make the money any other way.
I have found in my experience as an ugly transsexual and as the person I am now — who hopefully is not ugly, who hopefully is pretty — that people are a lot crueller to an ugly transsexual than they are to a beautiful one. When I started my transition, I didn't look anything like a female. I looked like a guy with a girl's haircut and plucked eyebrows. When I would walk down Yonge Street, for instance, every single per-son would look at me, and I would see expressions of pity or revulsion or anger in most of their faces. Now everyone still looks at me, but they have nice expressions on their faces a lot of the time.
I don't think I had plastic surgery because I am superficial. I spent eight years turning myself physically into the person I wanted to be, shaping my body so people would relate to me in a way I felt comfortable with. I had to get cut open a lot of times, and had to have sex with a lot of men to pay for it. I did that because this is the life I wanted to lead. Now I'm one of the happiest people I know, if not the happiest person I know.
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.
