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Artist uses a computer model of his face to get a French National ID

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Re: Artist uses a computer model of his face to get a French National ID

#41

Post by hashmal »

jacquesm wrote: post #15
noonespecial wrote: post #12

To be fair, his "photo" looks a lot more like him than my passport photo looks like me. It was taken early in the morning with an ancient camera under fluorescent lights at a post office. I am tinted decidedly green and my eyes look half closed. I look more like an extra on The Walking Dead than an international traveler. He claims the photo is a "fiction". All photos are. The photo's job is to say that "the person i…

> He claims the photo is a "fiction". All photos are. That's not true. Your passport photo is supposed to be a snapshot of what you looked like in person at a certain point in time. It is the difference between a registration and a creation. The likely effect of actions like these is that eventually the passport office will take the photographs to avoid people playing games with the system (such as: replacing the eye…

this is actually an interesting subject and one should not jump on quick/easy answers.

- is a photography really a snapshot of what something looks like? seems to be an easy one until you look closely at the history of technology behind photography

- if photography is a faithful representation of something, does it mean there's not "creation" involved? how can photography be considered art if it's not creation?

- "a passport photo is supposed to depict a snapshot of your face" and "all photos are fiction" are not mutually exclusive statements

- and so on

Re: Artist uses a computer model of his face to get a French National ID

#42

Post by Mz »

noonespecial wrote: post #12

To be fair, his "photo" looks a lot more like him than my passport photo looks like me. It was taken early in the morning with an ancient camera under fluorescent lights at a post office. I am tinted decidedly green and my eyes look half closed. I look more like an extra on The Walking Dead than an international traveler. He claims the photo is a "fiction". All photos are. The photo's job is to say that "the person i…

To be fair, his "photo" looks a lot more like him than my passport photo looks like me.

What on earth makes you assert this? Do you personally know the man?

Re: Artist uses a computer model of his face to get a French National ID

#43

Post by bobwaycott »

Benjammer wrote: post #28
noonespecial wrote: post #12

To be fair, his "photo" looks a lot more like him than my passport photo looks like me. It was taken early in the morning with an ancient camera under fluorescent lights at a post office. I am tinted decidedly green and my eyes look half closed. I look more like an extra on The Walking Dead than an international traveler. He claims the photo is a "fiction". All photos are. The photo's job is to say that "the person i…

>He claims the photo is a "fiction". All photos are. "Ceci n'est pas une pipe."

Ceci n'est pas une photo. :)

Re: Artist uses a computer model of his face to get a French National ID

#44

Post by staz »

Mz wrote: post #42
noonespecial wrote: post #12

To be fair, his "photo" looks a lot more like him than my passport photo looks like me. It was taken early in the morning with an ancient camera under fluorescent lights at a post office. I am tinted decidedly green and my eyes look half closed. I look more like an extra on The Walking Dead than an international traveler. He claims the photo is a "fiction". All photos are. The photo's job is to say that "the person i…

To be fair, his "photo" looks a lot more like him than my passport photo looks like me. What on earth makes you assert this? Do you personally know the man?

There are photos of him on others parts of the website

Re: Artist uses a computer model of his face to get a French National ID

#45

Post by Mz »

staz wrote: post #44
Mz wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, his "photo" looks a lot more like him than my passport photo looks like me. What on earth makes you assert this? Do you personally know the man?

There are photos of him on others parts of the website

I am not readily finding that. Can you provide links?

Re: Artist uses a computer model of his face to get a French National ID

#46

Post by BrandoElFollito »

jacquesm wrote: post #32
pikzen wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody uses pictures for identification. Not alone. In combination with everything else, maybe, but being French, I can even assure you that in most of the cases, people don't even look at your photo when checking your ID. They're always outdated, took in a weird lightning, and with a terrible quality. From an administration point of view, whether you took a picture of your face and mapped it onto a 3D model, or just…

Whether it is dumb or not does not matter. The facts are that biometric passports with pictures and fingerprints are the law of the land in a lot of places. That you got away with giving them four year old pictures is good for you, I tried and was refused (and had to go make new pictures). And I haven't changed all that much (the giveaway I guess was that the picture was the same as the one I gave them last time when…

This is indeed the reason.

When making ID cards for my children, I was too lazy to also apply for a passport at the same time. Applied a few weeks later and the photos got rejected because they were the same as the ID ones. According to the clerk, they can be identical only when both submissions are on the same day.

Re: Artist uses a computer model of his face to get a French National ID

#47

Post by jimmywanger »

jacquesm wrote: post #40
jimmywanger wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, this is correct. And that's exactly what this opens the door to. I don't quite understand what you mean. I get that it's technically illegal to swap pixels, but I don't think anybody can tell/would care if that happened. Only if a digitally altered picture can pass both a visual clerk test and facial recognition software will this be considered a problem. Also, everything is still pointing towards having the p…

> I get that it's technically illegal to swap pixels, but I don't think anybody can tell/would care if that happened. This was an extremely important part of the workflow we set up long ago, to ensure integrity. Even compression artifacts were 'out', this posed some very interesting challenges in controlling the laser printers available at the time to output grayshades (which they really did not want to do), early at…

> This was an extremely important part of the workflow we set up long ago, to ensure integrity

I guess I didn't make my question clear enough which is why that sort of integrity matters. Is it just in response to government legislation that has nothing to do with the usefulness of the ID, or is there some sort of measurable impact on the effectiveness of the ID if that sort of integrity is not followed?

A crappy photograph with no compression artifacts is arguably a worse form of ID than a very well taken image that has compression artifacts. And with an extra layer of lamination and holographic images superimposed across the pictures, why is that allowed but discreet photo manipulation isn't? Is it just that the government doesn't fully understand technology so just knee-jerk bans all of it, or is there an actual basis for the suspicion of such things leading to bad identification?

Re: Artist uses a computer model of his face to get a French National ID

#48

Post by seanmcdirmid »

jacquesm wrote: post #15
noonespecial wrote: post #12

To be fair, his "photo" looks a lot more like him than my passport photo looks like me. It was taken early in the morning with an ancient camera under fluorescent lights at a post office. I am tinted decidedly green and my eyes look half closed. I look more like an extra on The Walking Dead than an international traveler. He claims the photo is a "fiction". All photos are. The photo's job is to say that "the person i…

> He claims the photo is a "fiction". All photos are. That's not true. Your passport photo is supposed to be a snapshot of what you looked like in person at a certain point in time. It is the difference between a registration and a creation. The likely effect of actions like these is that eventually the passport office will take the photographs to avoid people playing games with the system (such as: replacing the eye…

Every single passport photo I got in china was "touched up" with photoshop to remove the background but also things like hair. This includes the photo I took for my USA passport renewal.

Re: Artist uses a computer model of his face to get a French National ID

#49

Post by jacquesm »

jimmywanger wrote: post #47
jacquesm wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I get that it's technically illegal to swap pixels, but I don't think anybody can tell/would care if that happened. This was an extremely important part of the workflow we set up long ago, to ensure integrity. Even compression artifacts were 'out', this posed some very interesting challenges in controlling the laser printers available at the time to output grayshades (which they really did not want to do), early at…

> This was an extremely important part of the workflow we set up long ago, to ensure integrity I guess I didn't make my question clear enough which is why that sort of integrity matters. Is it just in response to government legislation that has nothing to do with the usefulness of the ID, or is there some sort of measurable impact on the effectiveness of the ID if that sort of integrity is not followed? A crappy phot…

The integrity matters because anything other than that is considered a falsification. It's a legal requirement, not a technical one. Of course you could flip a LSB in some grayscale image and get away with it. But from a legal point of view you've just done something that is not allowed.

Re: Artist uses a computer model of his face to get a French National ID

#50

Post by jimmywanger »

jacquesm wrote: post #49
jimmywanger wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This was an extremely important part of the workflow we set up long ago, to ensure integrity I guess I didn't make my question clear enough which is why that sort of integrity matters. Is it just in response to government legislation that has nothing to do with the usefulness of the ID, or is there some sort of measurable impact on the effectiveness of the ID if that sort of integrity is not followed? A crappy phot…

The integrity matters because anything other than that is considered a falsification. It's a legal requirement, not a technical one. Of course you could flip a LSB in some grayscale image and get away with it. But from a legal point of view you've just done something that is not allowed.

Thank you for answering my question.

It's illegal because the law says that it's illegal, and the law doesn't really have any justification based in fact or actual use-cases, it's just legislation and legislation has a mind of its own.

So this new model might lead to additional legal changes, but the main changes a customer might see is that if the government decides it was wrong and decides on another definition of "falsification" (not likely) or the government doubles down and requires an audit trail of the ID photograph from the taking of the photograph and all devices used to process the photograph.

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