Photofit

Fourteen people were asked to create self-portraits, using a police Photofit kit from the 1970s, without referring to photographs or mirror images of themselves. They were then interviewed by Philip Oltermann on the subjects of identity and the self.

The project was made by Matt Willey (project link as well) and Giles Revell.
This is the direct download of the Photofit PDF.

Introduction from the book:
There are no photos in circulation of Jacques Penry, the man who
invented the Photofit, but from what he wrote in his books, you would
guess that he might have looked a bit suspicious. A photographer by
trade, the Frenchman had been fascinated by facial topography as
early as the 1930s, when he published his magnus opus The Face of
Man. There was, Penry claimed in it, a direct link between any human’s
physique and their personality: philosophers, for example, would show
a marked development of the lower cheek muscles, while idiots and
simpletons would invariably possess a markedly receding forehead.
Following the Penry-method of facial classification, he claimed, one
could cleanse society of “criminals, mental deficits, neurasthenics
and vocational misfits.”

Perhaps unaware of the supremacist overtones of it’s creator’s
early musings, Scotland Yard gave the Photofit kit a go in 1970. The
kits come in wooden boxes, containing narrow paper strips with
various facial features and an index listing the contents: eyes, noses,
mouths, haircuts, chins, roughly 40 in each category. There are
transparencies for add-ons, such as glasses, facial hairs or wrinkles,
and a frame on which the individual parts can be assembled.
The first Photofit portrait of a British suspect was broadcast
on 22nd of October 1970, in connection with the murder of James
Cameron in Islington, London. Surprisingly, it came up with the goods:
the image jogged a shop assistant’s memory and led to the arrest
of John Earnest Bennett in Nottingham. Soon though, policemen
found that Photofit portraits of suspects often looked nothing like
the criminals that were eventually caught: the Penry-method clearly
had its limits. In 1988, the Met introduced computer programmes
for facial profiling (“E-fits”) and Photofit kits across the country were
hurled onto rubbish heaps.

Penry’s system might have been inaccurate and ideologically
dubious, but it has qualities that appealed to us when we came up with
this project. Photofit is tactile: you can touch the individual parts with
your own hands and move them about until things click into place – it’s
like creating a puzzle. And it is immediate: there is no person standing
between you and the final picture. We managed to track down a male
and female kit from a Police Museum in Kent and invited a number
of people to assemble their own Photofit self-portrait in Giles’ studio
in Clerkenwell. The end result, we think, is curious. Each portrait tells
a story: it speaks of the hang-ups, insecurities and vanities we all have
about our own appearance. They hint at how deceptive our relationship
with our self-image can be. Jacques Penry claimed that he could deduce
a person’s character from their face in an instant. If nothing else, we
hope that this project shows how the connection between persona
and personality is a lot more complex than that.