The progress of Mr. Lincoln having attracted thousands of respectable friends and followers, especially in the large cities, it is by no means an unnatural consequence that large gangs of pickpockets are found to mingle in the throng...
As a specimen of their villainy we may state that a citizen of Germantown, or its vicinity, was robbed of three hundred dollars in gold...
Some of the most noted pickpockets following the wake of the President are known to the police, in consequence of their daguerreotype likenesses being affixed to the walls of the 'Rogues’ Gallery' at the Central station. A capital institution, that Rogues' Gallery.
– Philadelphia North American and United States Gazette, 22 February, 1861

When Abraham Lincoln was on his way across the country to his inauguration, a gang of pickpockets tagged along behind the presidential train. At every stop, it was reported, they made a rich haul by robbing distracted citizens. They didn't just pick a pocket or two. Thieves like this were a plague in the mid-19th Century.

That 'Rogues' Gallery' was a really good idea. Wonder who thought of it?

Rogues in Galleries

Photography's birthdate is usually given as 1839, the year Louis Daguerre introduced the daguerreotype to the world. In the 1850s, police around the world were noticing that it was useful to have a likeness of the criminals they were looking for. It helped to show them to potential witnesses, for example. By 1859, the New York City Police Department had collected 450 ambrotypes of crooks. Ambrotypes were just as clear as daguerrotypes, but faster and less expensive to make. (After all, the police didn't want them for keepsakes.) The NYPD put together a Rogues' Gallery. Citizens felt they were on their way to better police protection.

Photography, though still a bit experimental, messy, and technically tricky, had lots of eager experimenters. It wasn't hard to recruit police photographers. The real problem was getting the criminals to cooperate. Obviously, they didn't want their pictures taken. They'd fidget and make faces to throw the visual record off.

The one thing they didn't do was preen for the camera, a tendency people had already noticed in people 'having their pictures made.' As one observer of the New York rogues' gallery noted, there was 'the absence of the self-satisfied smirk and ghastly attempts to look handsome' that all too often marked sessions at the more fashionable photographers'¹

In Berlin, the photographers got clever: they hid the cameras. The criminals were photographed without their knowledge. (There were fewer civil rights lawyers in those days.)

Alphonse Bertillon Takes Things in Hand

All this enthusiastic police photography soon created another problem: volume. The French police soon had an overwhelming 100,000 photos in their collection. The Pinkerton Detective Agency in the US had the largest collection in the world. They used the images to produce the 'wanted' posters that became a staple of Wild West fiction.

Besides worrying the public that there were, lets face it, far too many crooks around, huge collections were hopelessly unwieldy. The suggestion, 'Come down to headquarters and look at few mugbooks' was not enticing. Obviously, a system was called for.

Much-needed organisation was provided by France's Alphonse Bertillon (1953-1914). Bertillon standardised the poses – full-face and right profile. He specified the ratio of reduction: the photo had to be one-seventh size. A specially-designed chair helped keep the poser in place. Police departments in the US loved the Bertillon system and adopted it.

Bertillon took lots of what we now call mugshots. You can see some in his classic work, La photographie judiciaire. If you read French, you can find out more about his method, too. Unfortunately not included is the mugshot he took of his two-year-old nephew. The kid was caught nibbling 'all the pears in the basket.' A more adorable criminal never existed.