Mugshot Mosaics
While doing research for the the Busted Weekly post from a couple days ago, I came across a whole bunch of mugshots - thousands of them. They’re all taken from the Kent County Inmate Lookup page. At the time, I downloaded a bunch of them, sure that I could find something interesting to do with them in the future.
I have. Using a piece of software called Metapixel, I turned all of those mugshots in to mosaics.
Thinking of possible subjects for a mugshot mosaic, my first thoughts were of crime, punishment, prisons, etc. I made the following mosaic, based on ethomsen‘s Flickr photo of the Salem Jail in Salem, Massachusetts.
Then I realized that prison mosaics were too… tasteless, I guess. It seems like something Busted Weekly would do. After all, the people whose mugshots I used for the jail mosaic weren’t yet convicted of any crimes: they were just arrested. They won’t spend any time in prison until/if they’re actually convicted for the crime they were arrested for.
I decided to use Jesus as the subject for my mugshot mosaics. It makes sense, I think: Jesus was arrested often for preaching the Word, and would have had the 1st century AD equivalent of a police mugshot. As God’s children, we all have a little bit of Jesus inside of us. Also, every single person on Earth, whether we have mugshots or not, was made in God’s image.
Click on the mosaic for a 1/7 scale version. The mosaic directly above is called “Christ In Majesty,” and is taken from a page from the Stavelot Bible page on Wikipedia. The original image is 13,000 pixels tall, and 294 MB. I also have a 3,500 pixel version.
You can download the mugshots that I used in zip format (125MB download) or bzip2 format (122MB download). I used Metapixel on Linux to make these mosaics: iMosaic is supposed to work well on Linux and Windows, although I haven’t tried it.
Let me know what you think about these. This is my first time making mosaics: I haven’t yet tried tweaking the mosaics at all yet for increased clarity or better color.
Posted on Dec 02, 2008 - 02:16 PM
Comments:
Amazing pictures
By Jinglestop on Sep 30, 2010 - 05:12 AM
