Why the Atlanta mugshots are so, so bad

As the mugshots of Donald Trump’s indicted allies rolled in this week one thing tied them all together: the photos, products of the Fulton County Sheriff’s office, all looked really, really bad.

“I thought these were all memes at first,” said Jake Olson, a photographer based in Columbus, Ohio. “It’s the perfect storm of bad photos.”

Last week, Mr Trump was charged with 18 co-conspirators with attempting to overturn his 2020 election defeat in the state of Georgia. Eight of those co-conspirators – Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, Kenneth Chesebro, Cathy Latham, Harrison Floyd, Mark Meadows and Ray Smith – have been booked and processed at the local jail in Atlanta.

Putting aside the political and legal consequences of the Atlanta indictments, all eight of the mugshots seem to be a photographer’s nightmare.

“Man…” Olson said, sounding almost overcome by the poor quality. “There are so many cardinal rules of photography that they are just not following.”

A key problem is the lighting – a single overhead source, which gives the images a slightly garish sheen and each person’s skin an unhealthy pallor.

“They have this one interrogation-style light, you can see they all have that little highlight on their foreheads,” said Pittsburgh photographer and professor Ray Mantle. “They all don’t look great… they all look tired.”

The grey background didn’t do them any favours either, Olson said. Neither did the watermark.

“It’s a bit egregious…it takes up 40% of the top half of the frame!”

Both Mantle and Olson commented on the range of expressions across the six suspects.

“If I were to try to pose somebody in a way that looks like a bad mugshot I would tell them to do exactly what they’re doing,” Olson said.

The expressions vary widely. Lawyer Jenna Ellis is beaming down the lens, while Ray Smith, also an attorney, glares into the camera – two strikingly different choices for a photo that, unlike most other mugshots, will be published far and wide.

“For a lot of these people, this is their major public debut,” Mantle said. “They know that everyone’s going to see these.”

And some of them, Mantle said, might regret it.

Still, pulling off a good mugshot can be tough, said Cooper Lawrence, a journalist who has written extensively about celebrity culture. It’s a difficult balance to strike, a challenge that celebrities like Justin Bieber, Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton have all had to face.

“Don’t smile. A smile will make it look too arrogant,” Lawrence said. “You want to smirk like Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton do. A smirk says, ‘yes, this sucks, but I’m gonna be fine.'”

Hair, makeup and wardrobe – even while in the custody of Fulton County authorities – is crucial, she said.

But “keep it simple”, she said. “You’re going to jail, not on an audition.”