From: Vaught's 'Practical Character Reader'
Drawing can lead us into many strange territories, one of which is 'witness description composite drawing'. In the United States artists are employed by police departments, usually in the forensic evidence department. For instance witness description composite drawing is what the artist Harvey Pratt has spent most of the last 50 years working on. He has worked as a forensic artist for various police forces, whilst also being recognised as an accomplished master Native American Indian artist. In fact it was this dual role that first attracted me to his work.
The term 'composite art' was originally used when facial features (eyes, noses, lips, hair, facial shapes) were compiled to complete a total composite of a face. This procedure was to be used by a witness who was guided through a process of how to match these various facial features in order to form an image of a suspect. Witness description composite drawings were basically the same technique but were drawn free hand and based on an interview of a witness or victim to determine what someone might look like. These drawings are regarded as investigative aids and they are used to help narrow down suspect lists. Witness description drawing can be used not only to identify suspects but also identify tattoos, vehicles and other items that a witness might describe during an interview. Below are examples of witness description composite drawings made by Harvey Pratt beside photos of the subject later identified.
Considered one of the leading forensic artists in the United States, Harvey Pratt spent over 50 years in law enforcement, completing thousands of witness description drawings and hundreds of soft tissue reconstructions. You could say that Harvey Pratt had an interesting portfolio, being a Cheyenne and Arapaho tribal member and also being recognised as an accomplished master Native American Indian artist. Both these aspects of his working life as an artist involved making portraits of people, some being one step removed both emotionally and in terms of experience and others made to celebrate his ethnic origins and feeling of belonging to a tribal culture.
Harvey Pratt: Drawing of a Native American
I'm sure some of you will be worried by the fact that someone like Harvey should be introduced under the umbrella of a fine art drawing blog, but one of the issues I am trying to open out is where are the boundaries between fine art, illustration and other occupations whereby similar skills are used? All of these people are called artists and the art world is prone to snobbery, so it is always worthwhile stepping back to explore how broad the church of the artist really is, and as we do so perhaps we also have to ask questions as to how does an artist contribute to society?
A very similar profession to witness description drawing is of course courtroom drawing. In the UK photographs are not allowed to be taken whilst a trial is in progress. A courtroom sketch is defined as an 'artistic depiction' of the proceedings in a court of law and of course this means that news media have to rely on sketch artists for illustrations of the proceedings, which is probably the main way that the general public get to see hand drawn portraits of people.
Priscilla Coleman: Naomi Campbell and Piers Morgan for ITN
Priscilla Coleman: Artist's notes from courtroom observations
I like to think about the notes taken by these artists as drawings in their own right. They are part of the process of remembrance and are used as triggers to ensure images are brought back as accurately as possible.
The courtroom artist is a skilled compiler of facial images and they are making notes knowing they are going to construct an image of a face within a few minutes of making their notes. They understand how heads are constructed and have training and years of experience. Compare this to a crime witness's memory of a person that is recalled perhaps several days later or even more, that then has to be translated or communicated to an artist who then has to render the image. When I looked at communication theory I pointed out that Shannon and Weaver wanted to make sure that communication systems worked well. The model they came up with allows us to easily see where problems in a communication system could go wrong.
In particular the information source needs to be working in such a way that it is decipherable by the information destination. So in this case we have someone who was probably very stressed at the time of the experience, having to recall the facial features of someone they may only have glanced at for a few seconds. Not only that, they will have had no training in the recognition and identification of facial features and no specialist language to help them either. You should try this yourself, give a verbal description of someone to another student and ask them to make a portrait from that description. The receiver also needs to be good enough to understand or not distort the message coming through. In this case either the police artist uses their experience based on previous encounters or they use the composite model. The skills of the drawer and the ability of the drawer to put this information into an effective shape for transmission are again vital. You very quickly begin to realise how amazing it is that any communication is made at all. But, and this is the real problematic issue, what both people in this communication system have in common is a set of preconceptions, stereotypes and ideas about what people look like and this is perhaps what they are really communicating. If we look at Vaught's Practical Character Reader's honest face, as seen at the top of this post, we see perhaps one end of a stereotype scale that the crime victim and police artist are measuring their ideas against. For instance in many experiments in relation to emotions instigated by facial type, people respond that they trust and find honesty in faces that are more symmetrical. Symmetry is at the core of a police artist's working system. Below is a verbatim account given by a working police artist of how they set out to do their work, the ruled pad is what they use as a starting point for every drawing.
A police artist's ruled drawing pad
"I draw the mouth while the witness looks through the chins. I draw the chin and sides of the face, after referring back to the shape of the face. I always draw the top of the head with just the forehead. I always put generic ears on, unless they were a feature the witness remembered specifically".
"I get the witness to find the hairstyle somewhere in the book. Once the line drawing is completed I have the witness look it over. I make changes by erasing with the kneadable eraser and re-sketching until the drawing is as close to the suspect as the witness can remember. I have the witness rate the line drawing on a scale of one to ten, "ten" being a portrait (really close), and "one" being no where near close. Now, with the line drawing as close to the suspect as the witness can remember, I add skin tone and shading".
In the example above it is interesting to see how the artist leads the crime victim through a series of decision making choices, ones that must influence the final outcome.
What the artist is doing is very closely modelled on the 'Photo-fit' kit.
You can of course download an app to do this on your phone
The Photo-fit' kit
The Photo-FIT kit for police forces was derived from the work of Jacques Penry. In the video clip below you can see him at work. The video is a timely reminder of how social convention was often thought of as being fact and that old beliefs in physiognomy, or the practice of assessing a person's character or personality from their outer appearance persisted for many years after they were shown to be false.
Jacques Penry describes his system
Lavater’s apparatus for making silhouettes
The 'proof' that you were an upstanding citizen could then after your portrait had been made, be framed and put on your wall.
Portrait by Robert Friend
Our continued need to control how we look in relation to how facial features are read within society means that for instance, because selfies distort the face many people are undergoing plastic surgery on their noses in order to make them smaller. Mobile phone photographs misrepresent looks, because from the distance of an arms length, most lenses will make the nose appear bigger in proportion to the rest of the face. People who are not photographers don't realise that camera lenses are not the same as normal eyesight. However the selfie becomes the 'reality' and is measured by social convention and that is itself determined by very old ideas that are still rooted in concepts that came from physiognomy.
There is something weird about all these depictions of people. They are either abject in the sense that measured 'people' are completely without pride or dignity; or they are about lack of self worth. Julia Kristeva in 'the Powers of Horror' states that the abject refers to the human reaction to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other. These images of faces seem to encompass all of these definitions and yet at the same time they reach out into a western European past that shows a continuing need to measure and determine ourselves through measurement. According to Foucault, knowledge is only possible within a vast system of power relationships that allow that knowledge to come to be. I.e. society allows these strange readings to continue and be used as if they are 'knowledge' because some powerful people find it useful.
In 1902 Vaught's 'Practical Character Reader' was published. It's hard to believe that this is a Twentieth Century publication, as it seems almost Medieval in its reasoning.
It is interesting to compare and contrast the total humbug of Vaught's 'Practical Character Reader' above with the images below as set out by a contemporary company advertising its skills in plastic surgery.
These images are meant to demonstrate how rhinoplasty can improve your facial harmony
A repose frontal mask
Some experts on facial harmony use a measuring system based on the golden ratio, the one above does that. You are asked to overlay the Repose Frontal Mask (also called the RF Mask or Repose Expression Frontal View Mask) over a photograph of your own face to help you apply makeup, to aid in evaluating your face for facial surgery, or simply to see how much your face conforms to the measurements of the Golden Ratio.
Durer
Durer, like the forensic police artist, was attempting to develop a system that could capture the almost indefinable essence of what it is to be an individual.
Our current obsession with faces and the selfie, as already suggested, leads us into plastic surgery, an area where facial measurement is an obsession, such an obsession that it has led to a specific discipline, 'faciometrics'. Faciometrics consists of making direct measurements from predefined anthropometric points. In order to do this a facial ruler is used and measurements linked to standardised references for quantitative analysis. The relationship between these measurements then guides facial interpretation. A Practical Guide for Orofacial Harmonisation, states that 'with these normative parameters, we can guide harmonisation procedures and recover facial proportions, making facial features more similar to the reference.' 'In this way, we will achieve more individualised planning that will be a more assertive approach in the proposed treatment.' See: https://www.mathewsopenaccess.com/full-text/faciometrics-a-practical-guide-for-orofacial-harmonization
Beauty Setup ruler (A) Caliper (B)
The table below sets out the main anthropometric points for facial harmonisation.
Points | Initials | Description |
Trichion | Tr | A point at on the hairline in the midline of the forehead |
Glabella | G´ | Most prominent midpoint between eyebrows |
Endocanthion | En | Inner commissure of palpebral fissure (left and right) |
Exocanthion | Ex
| Outer commissure of palpebral fissure (left and right) |
Pupil | P | The black circle in the center of the iris. |
Nasion | N´ | The midline point of the nasal root and nasofrontal region. |
Pronasale | Prn | Most prominent midpoint of nasal tip |
Nasal Alare | Al
| Most lateral point of alar contour (left and right) |
Zyghion | Zy
| The point of the most lateral soft tissue overlying the zygomatic arch (left and right). |
Subnasale | Sn | Midpoint of columellar base at junction of upper lip |
A´ | A´ | The point on the midline of greater concavity in the facial contour of the upper lip, between the subnasale point and the upper lip. |
Crista Philtri | Cph | The point at each elevated margin of the philtrum just above the vermilion line |
Labiale superius | Ls | The midpoint of the vermilion line of the upper lip |
Stomion | St | Midpoint of the labial fissure between gently closed lips |
Cheilion | Ch | Lateral extent of labial commissure (left and right) |
Labialeinferius | Li | The midpoint of the lower vermilion line |
Gonion | Go
| The most lateral point on the mandibular angle (gonial angle). Its location is close to that of the bony gonion. (left and right) |
B’ | B´ | The point on the midline with greater concavity on the facial contour of the lower lip, located between the lower lip and the soft chin. It is the deepest point of the mentolabial fold. |
Pogonion | Pg′ | The most anterior midpoint of the chin. |
Mento | Me′ | The lowest point on the midline of the soft tissue of the chin. This is the lowest point in the measurement of facial height. |
Within a few moments we have moved from the abject to a set of concerns that are all about beauty. Durer was looking for harmonic proportion, and so is the plastic surgeon. The drawings done by the police forensic artists are an attempt to gain control of what is unknown, an attempt to find the criminal face, a project I would have thought doomed by subjectivity. But so are the standards of beauty we see set out in the supporting information for those dealing with faciometrics. These images, usually of white women, are yet another problematic concept. The unconscious bias in our actions and beliefs, is not in fact unconscious, its pretty easy to see that the models these facial features are based on are of a certain type and the type reflects the dominant characteristics of the people who control the technology.
Drawing as both witness and control shows us that what we would normally see as activities outside of fine art drawing as a discipline, are in fact areas that highlight issues for any artist doing something as apparently straightforward as making an image of someone's face. As soon as I begin to draw I'm reminded of those hours of practice as a student, always being told to measure the situation again, always been pushed towards an idea of accuracy. Strangely the more you were able to grasp things like perspective and get what you were drawing 'right' the more you were asked to now push past superficial 'likeness' and to now look for the action of perception, the traces of head movement that you initially had tried to iron out but which now became vital to the 'life' of the looking and its capture in the drawing.
Drawing of a face using eye tracking technology
I have recently been exploring portraiture myself, an area of art practice that is full of clichés and a perceived need for 'likenesses' and one that on the whole I have always suggested students steer well clear of, but people persist in making them, so rather than avoid the problem, I've decided to tackle it head on. The first issue of course being 'likeness'. Likeness nearly always comes up when in conversation with someone from outside of the art business. "It looks just like a photograph" being many people's judgement call when it comes to likeness and of course the best way for an image to be "just like a photograph" is to work from one. This personally seems a redundant exercise so I never use photographs. Likeness is also measured against a normally seen static image, so I never ask my sitters to keep still, I just respond to the interaction of an exchanged conversation and as materials come into play I let the materials interact with myself and what I am experiencing. The images therefore become records of time spent with someone, rather than depictions of them. This feels much more honest and about people or encounters rather than renderings and copies. I want to avoid ways of working that tend to get people looking at themselves as if seen in a mirror, and checking for likeness. I want people to begin looking at the images as if they were new things, new figures formed from paint and ink and pens and brushes, things that talk their own language and which you have to look at very carefully if you want to listen to what they are saying.
From an ongoing series of encounters with people
Drawing and photography or an attempt to think about why someone might work from a photograph
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