Mastering Your Mugshot

Self-consciousness, as August Mclaughlin notes in a recent post, will almost invariably show through in your headshots. But there’s a way you can avoid it:

Don’t try to hard. Use your imagination to drift away during the shoot. In particular, don’t think about the photos during the shoot. This may sound odd, but it helps minimize self-consciousness — a potential awesome-photo wrecker. You know how we love characters with secrets? Have one! Look into the lens with your secret in mind… (source)

August, a quondam model who writes thrillers, gives us such sage advice here that I thought it would be instructive to see some real-life examples. The following are a few of my favorites:

This is an actual mugshot of Indiana paint-huffer Kelly Gibson. Here we see a relaxed young man, comfortable in front of the camera, without any trace of self-consciousness. Your secret is safe with me, he seems to be saying.

The calm, defiant look in Johnny Depp's eye ALMOST seems to be saying "Fuck you!"

This is an example of how NOT to take a mugshot, an obviously self-conscious Mel Gibson. Poor, poor photo.

This, on the other hand, taken some four years previous, is an excellent mugshot, a clearly relaxed and UNselfconscious Mel Gibson.

Vince Vaughn when he still had his edge -- and this mugshot shows it.

Man-O-War or Secretariat? That same unanswerable question can, I believe, be just as appositely applied to Nick Nolte's and James Brown's mugshots.

James Brown? Nick Nolte? Unanswerable!

But the clear winner is exactly whom you’d guess, that deadly handsome man:

The Thin White Duke: dandy and dapper even in jail

Speaking of deadly handsome, here’s a gorgeous video you’ve probably never seen, containing a song you’ve probably never heard:

(Hat tip August.)

Addendum: Matthew McConaughey — a cool breeze:

What Is Beauty?

A reader writes:

Dear Sir: What is beauty? Is it anything?

– Lily Alderman

Dear Lily: It is everything. Beauty is the esthetically pleasing, it is the lovely. Aristotle wrote: “Beauty depends on size as well as symmetry” (ahem, ahem). But beauty is symmetry. Beauty is congruence. It is the bah-bah in black sheep. Beauty is not, finally, inexplicable or ineffable, but it is elusive.

Darwin noted that a streak of stew in a man’s beard is not beautiful, but he pointed out also — and sagely so — that neither the soup nor the beard is inherently non-beautiful.

Beauty requires, among other things, that sensory data bring with it a very specific kind of emotional pleasure — one which awakens “the contemplative in man,” as Kant said — such as you might feel, for instance, when you see the Northern Lights, or hear a profound song. Beauty even encompasses melancholy.

Beauty is the symbol of symbols. Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it shows us itself, it shows us the whole fiery-colored world. No object is so ugly that, under certain conditions, it will not look beautiful; no object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.

Said Oscar Wilde.

Beauty, properly defined, is part of the science of axiology, which is the study of values. Axiology, in turn, is a sub-division of aesthetics. The science of beauty is called aesthetics.

But that’s all purely academic.

Here, Lily, is the only thing you really need to know about beauty:

Sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds:
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

(Sonnet 94.)