Commonly photos have a black bar overlaid over the person’s eyes to conceal the person’s identity. Sometimes the region near the eyes is pixelated. Usually the rest of the face is clearly visible. Here is an example.
In the photo above, I am certain I can identify the person based on other facial features. The strip covering the eyes is too thin.
If the purpose is to conceal identity, shouldn’t they have better mechanisms to pixelate or obscure a larger portion of the face? It is not only the eyes that convey unique identity, though as I understand it the eyes convey a lot of information to the brain for facial recognition.
It helps to obscure the identity, but I think in most cases it’s more for legal reasons – it’s proof that you took effort to conceal the subjects identity.
Apropos of nothing, I had a microbiology professor who used to show pictures like this to illustrate various diseases, and every single time he put one up, he’d say, “And this poor guy has also been afflicted with blindness, as you can see.”
Sometimes it’s important to show the face to illustrate the features of the disease, which is why they don’t black out the whole face. When the face isn’t important, often the entire face will be blacked out or pixilated. When the whole face including the eyes are important (for example, in illustrating Down Syndrome, or Treacher-Collins Syndrome), you can find plenty of pictures with no features obscured. I assume it takes more paperwork to get the rights to use those. Sometimes you see drawings instead of photos, as well.
It’s more to the point that people don’t recognize the subject after the fact, from seeing the picture, than that they don’t recognize someone they know in the picture. Even with the whole face obscured, there’s still a chance you might recognize someone you already know. But that’s not what the protection is for. It’s to keep you from remembering the picture well enough to remember the person if you meet him later, and even a thin line over the eyes can do that, because the chances of you recognizing someone from a single picture anyway are actually not that good.
Probably this. It was widely used in days past. True crime magazines and the like used it commonly in the 50s and 60s, and maybe before, I’ve just never seen that kind of magazine older than that. It was done in some early porn mags also, maybe to convince models to disrobe, but I think more likely to add an air of illicitness to the photos.
ETA: In the porn mags it was also used to cover up other things, probably for legal purposes as well.
Sorry I can’t provide a cite, because I’m working off memories of 30 years ago and this was in the days before the internet took off, but IIRC one left-wing rag put up a photo of two police officers with their eyes barred and the title was ‘SPG scum’ or similar (SPG was the Special Patrol Group) when the SPG were being reviled. In fact neither were in the SPG, but one was sufficiently identifiable that he won damages.
When my SIL was diagnosed with cancer of the breast, I did some research.
Came across a video from the very early days of motion pictures - there was an overstuffed living room-style chair and a floor lamp with a hanging lamp - like cheap over-the-table hanging lamp.
A nurse guided the patient into the chair - the patient was female and topless. She was seated in the chair so that her head was completely behind the lamp.
She had three huge lumps between and above her breasts - doubt that she lived too much longer - esp. in 1910-1915.
That is sloppy work. I can clearing see the shape of his face and face features and If he was family member of me I would know him.
No reality TV show like cops or news would use that. Even some soft tone blurring of the face you can sorta of make out.There was show on cops and they where blurring out the private parts of guy nude!! You can still see the private parts a bit with soft tone.The big black or heavy tone you cannot make out what it is.
I took several drawing classes in college. When we had an assignment to draw a portrait of a classmate, even the better artists would often create what looked like a perfectly fine drawing of somebody’s face, it just didn’t look at all like the person it was supposed to be. The professor said the key is to pay close attention to the shape of the eyes. So the eyes do carry a lot of ID info.
