Have you seen the criteria for passport photos? ‘Face forward’ it says. Yes, that would seem sensible enough so far. Then: ‘Must be taken within the last month’. Again, logical enough. Do they expect someone to send in a school photo?! (‘What do you mean this isn’t me? This is exactly what I looked like when I was 9, how dare you!’)
But then we come to ‘No grinning, no frowning, no raised eyebrows’. ‘No raised eyebrows young man’, as if we’re small children being cocky in the schoolroom.
What we need is a ‘completely neutral expression with your mouth closed’. ‘Yes, that’s right closed, young man, I don’t know what’s funny about that!’ So basically they mean ‘act and look completely expressionless’. Lovely.
And then it says the photo should be a true likeness. Surely no one is, in practice, completely expressionless. People at airports, where, let’s face it, the majority of us will be using these passports, are rarely completely expressionless. There’ll be smiles, tears perhaps. Not 'completely neutral expressions with mouths closed'.
What the criteria should say is ‘look like you would look at an airport’. Petrified (will the plane crash), sad (will I see her again), worried (will I see the kids again), hungry (will I have time for lunch).
Today, you see people now heading to passport control thinking, ‘right, I must look depressed, I must look like my passport’. Women are thinking ‘How am I going to get my hair like that? What was I thinking! Just look depressed, everything’ll be fine…’
Previously people must have been a bit cocky with their photos I reckon, smiling just a little bit too much. At the passport office, officials would go ‘that’s fine, that’s fine, oh no now that’s too smiley’
They tried measuring smiles –
‘smile like you’re slightly amused, as if you’ve just remembered a funny thing that happened to you last Tuesday morning at work’ – Acceptable
‘smile like you’ve just won the lottery, a free holiday and a month off work’ – Not acceptable
But no they thought, this is too difficult. ‘Right, that’s it, no one must smile. Everyone must look the same with expressionless faces, face forward, yes face forward, come on’
But then right at the very bottom is a little aside: ‘rules are relaxed slightly for children under five. They…do not need to have a neutral expression’. Phew.
