Flexible Faces: The History, Software, and Politics of Facial Recognition

From nineteenth-century scientific efforts to measure and classify faces to the personalized technology that unlocks your smartphone, facial recognition has reinvented itself, insinuating its logic into the fabric of everyday life.Facial recognition technologies (FRTs) have become ubiquitous through integration with computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Yet, the significance of facial recognition is not its technical prowess, Aaron Tucker argues, but its persistent political project: the sustained desire to render all subjects legible to the state - a drive foundational to its history as a technology of power.Looking back at Francis Galton’s work on vision and eugenics, Woodrow W. “Woody" Bledsoe’s 1960s experiments in automated facial recognition, and the first public demonstration in 1970, Tucker traces how FRTs emerged from the convergence of photography, identity documentation, and computer vision.Accelerated by crises such as 9/11 and the COVID-19 pandemi