Our Faces, Our Selves
Self portraits via the police Identi-Kit
by Giles Revell, Matt Willey and Matthew McKinnon
Garvia Bailey, Radio host:
I felt angry with a lot of things, including the kit. Then I started feeling angry with myself — I thought it was me, that I was the problem. I wasn't thinking about it hard enough or being creative enough or knowing myself well enough to make it work. I soon came to realize it was the limitations of trying to fit myself onto these little cards.
So much of what I am and what I do is about empathizing with people, trying to figure out who they are, trying to get into their heads . This is like therapy — aesthetic therapy — where you have to break yourself down and put yourself back together again. I've seen myself through so many other people's eyes that it's difficult.
When it came down to it, I had to pick kind, Caucasian eyes. The black eyes were all mean. Not even just the eyes. The lips were mean. The noses — if a nose can be mean. When I put my composite together, sometimes I had to soften it by going to the Caucasian features, which is ludicrous.
For the majority of my upbringing, unless somebody pointed it out, I didn't see myself as anything different than the little white girls who were all my best friends. I didn't see myself as different until I moved to Toronto for university, and then all of a sudden I was a black girl. I was supposed to be that, and I didn't know what that was. For the black kids who grew up in Toronto I wasn't black enough, and for the white folks I was hanging out with I was a black Toronto girl. It took a while for me to settle into who I am. Being Jamaican and growing up in Stratford has shaped who I am now. It took a lot to reconcile all that and
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.
