The Passport as a Medium of Movement

Abstract

Passports are integral for bodies to move across borders and enable decisions on who is allowed to pass through ports and who has to stay within specific jurisdictional areas. In the nineteenth century, passport documents were still mainly letters of reference, indicating the importance of the issuer. Only later, and increasingly since the First World War, they also became a means of identification. Today, identification in electronic form is key for passport development, which is why centralised and widely standardised registers such as the Finnish Population Information System have become obligatory points of passage for passport development. In this paper, based on empirical research in Finnish archives, museums and among passport developers, we identify four regimes within the history of Finnish passports that all rely on distinct modes of cooperation among applicants, issuers, registers and border officials. While in the nineteenth century passport holders had significant agency in negotiating who they were at border crossings, slowly but surely the ability for a physical body to speak for itself has diminished. Instead, over time, centralised registers were built, which need to be continually updated before any changes in passport documentation can be made. Today, the body is read and deciphered, increasingly with automated means, and the results need to match the information found in electronic form. The passport, as a medium of movement, is only temporarily stabilized for a limited period of time. It is continually modified and developed as the infrastructures for supporting and inhibiting human movement change. Different passport regimes are therefore tied to different modes of cooperation, and only their description allows us to gain an understanding of passports as a medium of movement.

1 Introduction

The movement of increasing numbers of people, travelling further, more frequently and at an unprecedented scale became one of the major trends of the twentieth century. It affected investments, life plans and the fabric of social relationships. In introducing the new mobilities paradigm at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Mimi Sheller and John Urry (2006, p. 207) highlighted how this success story is reflected in different forms of movement:

All the world seems to be on the move. Asylum seekers, international students, terrorists, members of diasporas, holidaymakers, business people, sports stars, refugees, backpackers, commuters, the early retired, young mobile professionals, prostitutes, armed forces—these and many others fill the world’s airports, buses, ships, and trains [...]. This is so even after September 11, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), multiple suicide bombings of transport networks, and other global catastrophes, and the fact that many grand projects in transport do not at first generate the scale of anticipated traffic.

As we write this paper, the COVID-19 pandemic has seen limitations and restrictions imposed on free movement, with state-ordered curfews and lockdowns over the entire globe, in order to contain and gain control of a globally spreading disease. At first sight, these recent developments appear to suggest a curtailment of the success story of global movement, at least according to the terms set out by Sheller and Urry. Even if in the near future state-led efforts to control a disease that is hard to track halt the expansion of global mobility, the new mobilities paradigm—particularly when applied in connection with research on infrastructure—has provided arenas for discussing some of the main sites where mobility is negotiated, such as airports, urban centres and the infrastructures on which they rely. In our contribution, we will explore the role of official documentation required for movement, with a particular focus on the history of the passport. This focus allows us to view movement as heavily mediated, with specific focusing media (Grasseni & Gieser, 2019) being more relevant than others for the ability to move.

In this paper, we will discuss the pivotal role that passports play as a medium of movement. We will pay particular attention to the ways in which they have been used to assess the movability of human bodies from one location to another. The empirical basis of our work are materials collected from various archives in Finland, the main national setting of our project,¹ and interviews we have started conducting with people involved in the development of Finland’s passports from political, technological and other angles. While more general overviews (e.g. Keshavarz, 2019; Häkli, 2015) provide breadth, the focus on a single country affords a more comprehensive in-depth examination of a coherent spectrum of passports all from a single locale. At a later stage, this may pave the way for a comparative study with identification documents from other settings, such as the US (see Robertson, 2010), the UK (Lloyd, 2003) or historical states that no longer exist (e.g. Jansen, 2009) and with other types of documents in particular environments—for instance credit cards in Germany (Gießmann, 2020). In addition, the Finnish material can inform studies of scaling processes, in particular research on which elements of passports have historically achieved a ‘global’ recognition by conforming with interoperability standards (such as ISO/IEC 19794-5) and which have remained idiosyncratic—i.e. ‘local’.

Our findings reveal how, at particular points in time, specific and varying constellations of bodies, documents and archives offered blueprints for permission to travel. For example, at many border crossings in the 1800s, the person’s identity, the correspondence between the body carrying the document and the body referenced by the document was confirmed via a speech act from the body questioned, involving details of identity such as the person’s name, profession, residence and travel arrangements, alongside the way in which the everyday had become inscribed within the body of the person wishing to pass (Caplan, 2001). In these days, while selfsameness was read from the body, the person’s moral character was attested in writing by authorities such as a church minister or, later, the relevant municipality (Haara & Lehmuskallio, 2020). As the First World War unfolded, the speaking body was beginning to receive less credit than its correct documentation amid fears of spies, traitors and fraudsters (Robertson, 2010). Soon, photographs were introduced. At first, these were used in accordance with ideals of mechanical objectivity (Daston & Galison, 1992) to connect physical bodies to material documents. Only much later did they become visually ordered in a similar vein to forensic portraits of criminals, which also showed wide representational variety in its early days (Regener, 1999). Technologies of identification have gained increasing importance in the decades since, such that identification based on electronic biometrics has in recent years nearly become a global norm.

In our discussion, we will examine the development of bureaucratic procedures required to apply for and receive a passport. Then we will explore the specific ways in which bodies are inscribed in passport documents. We have identified four periods that frame these developments in Finland: (1) a pre-photographic period, before the First World War; (2) the introduction of the applicant’s photograph and signature; (3) the visual structuring of the face from 1960 to 2005; and (4) the current period, characterised by the introduction of electronic machine-readable passports. These periods will be considered alongside four modes of cooperation, which evolved roughly in parallel with the periods. We will discuss the variety in cooperation in relation to passport developments, but with a greater focus on the assemblages required to produce specific passports, including application procedures, register practices, archives and others. Our understanding of cooperation therefore refers particularly to the research on cooperative practices among library, museum and computing professionals (e.g. Star & Griesemer, 1989; Bowker & Star, 1999), which has since also been adopted for research on practices in the field of media studies (e.g. Gießmann & Taha, 2017).

We will show in our paper how mobility, identified as central within the mobilities paradigm, is crucially mediated by technologies such as the passport and the infrastructural elements on which it relies. We will limit our focus on mobility within the mobilities paradigm on the movement of people across borders, and specifically on how this movement has been curtailed historically both within and between states by introducing passports as a requirement to cross the border. This focus allows us to point out how, within different periods of passport use, variations of cooperation developed, which each put a different emphasis on what elements in situations of inspection are deemed trustworthy. In hindsight, these different varieties of cooperation were only temporarily stable, but enough so to call them distinct passport regimes in relation to the history of the Finnish passport. Of special interest in our discussion is that the actors imbued with agency in these cooperation patterns change significantly as passport regimes change. Hence, the passport as a medium is a highly specific type of document, transmitting and translating mobility differently, depending on the passport regime in which it is, albeit only temporarily, embedded.

2 Bureaucracy as a Means of Negotiating Cooperation: From Local Agreements to Central Registers

Since the 1980s in particular, media theorists and social scientists have focused on the question of how knowledge is translated between social worlds, with special attention to the cultural techniques and material artefacts employed in this transfer. Michel Callon, Bruno Latour and John Law have named the translation of knowledge from one social world to another interessement, with a particular emphasis on the ways in which non-scientists’ concerns become entwined in scientists’ interests (Callon & Law, 1982; Latour, 1987). Their work has been especially useful for highlighting obligatory points of passage (Callon, 1985): the nodes in a given network where all actors need to be engaged if they wish to participate in that particular (actor-)network. In the history of technological infrastructure, competing actors have regularly attempted to establish and maintain obligatory points of passage of various types, from the gauge of railroad tracks or the size of overseas freight containers to the telecommunication standards for mobile phone network interoperability.

In international travel, the passport is the quintessential artefact required for passing through ports today, one that people have to apply for and collect upon completion of the correct procedures. The applicant has to fill in several forms and consult authorities to request positive assessments, which are sent, in turn, to other authorities for verification and then returned with the inscriptions required for the person to travel. As this description highlights, the passport epitomises a cooperatively produced document. In further stages of cooperation, the document can be shown to others and inscribed again to allow the human body in question to move from one jurisdiction to another. Each joint operation necessarily leaves its traces in the document itself or in the registers that, by supporting and enabling the issue of passports, transform the legal, political and social status of its bearer.

Bruno Latour (1986) has used the term ‘immutable mobiles’ for objects of this nature, since they are sent out to others (or carried in a jacket pocket). Hence they are mobile and yet hold unchanging fundamental parameters and therefore can be carried back to an original location as documents that have a verification function. However, as the history of passports shows and many of Latour’s examples attest, these documents are not truly immutable. Far more malleable than such a notion would admit, these objects get tinkered with, may be inscribed with new material, and have fields that may be either left blank for completion later or changed outright. In short, these documents have not always been used as originally planned—their use has often been renegotiated. Extending beyond the scale of an individual passport, the mutations have also demonstrated evolution over time at an institutional level. We will consider these patterns and their emergence below.

Changes in the passport application procedures demonstrate the kinds of cooperation that historically have been deemed necessary to verify one’s identity when requested by municipal or state authorities. They also point to variations and changes in what Alfred Gell (1998) refers to as agent-patient relationships within these settings. In the most profound of these, alluded to above, the sense that the speaking body is able to provide evidence of itself has inevitably given way to automatons that read evidence directly from the body inspected.

In the following, we will provide a short overview of the history of passport usage and application processes in Finland. This shows that, as local registers were superseded by centralised ones, the passport’s main function also changed. While a passport was initially mainly a letter of reference, over time, as passports were issued and regulated more centrally by the state, it became predominantly a means for identification which required the document to match the records in the central registry it is based upon.

2.1 The Passport as a Letter of Recommendation

In medieval and early modern Europe, diverse entities (e.g. guilds and churches) were responsible for establishing the identity of their members in domestic contexts and abroad. While a passport in today’s sense may serve as sufficient proof of its holder’s identity, relatively few people possessed any such document. Rather than a means of identification, the passports they carried were basically letters of recommendation, each of which was only one travel document among several (Fahrmeir, 2001, p. 218 f.; Groebner, 2001).

The person’s appearance, manner of dress and ability to demonstrate proper behaviour were long considered as appropriate signs of belonging to a suitably high class (Einonen et al., 2016; Fahrmeir, 2001, p. 218; Robertson, 2010, p. 161). Members of the kinetic elite (Wood & Graham, 2006) who enjoyed heightened mobility had these marks of differentiation written into their bodies, as part of their habitus. Conversely, travellers who were not well-off members of elite or bourgeois circles needed to carry numerous documents to prove themselves harmless and free to travel, often when travelling within their own municipality or even merely wishing to leave the estate where they worked. Travel permits were issued on the basis of first-hand knowledge of the individual from the time the issuer and the traveller spent in the same locality. Hence, the passport issuer exercised discretion rather than making a decision based on comparative documentation.

Passports, as a medium of movement, were therefore used for socially categorising citizens and foreigners alike, producing regimes of differential mobility, correlated with the social category travellers happened to belong to. In this respect, passports are not only akin to a ‘key for travel’, allowing travellers to move from one jurisdiction to the next, but also a means for issuers to state and reinforce social preferences and value hierarchies.

In Finland, the first modern passport regulation, passed in 1862, made state-issued passports compulsory for all who wished to cross the country’s borders. The motives stated were similar to reasons given by other European states at the time: to prevent discontented parties and spies from entering the country and congregating and to help suppress vagrancy, banditry and crime (Fahrmeir, 2001, p. 219). In the nineteenth century, travelling was still considered a privilege, reserved for only a few, except in cases of compulsory migration. Freedom of movement was tied to social status, as was reflected in the various travel permits that Finns needed both for crossing the border and for domestic travel. For example, under the 1862 regulation, senior officials and bishops were to be issued passports for travelling abroad only with the permission of the Finnish Senate, and students at Alexander University in Helsinki required a certificate from the rector before becoming eligible to apply for a passport. The lower classes were more place-bound than the upper classes. For instance, a member of the former who needed a certificate to travel abroad had to obtain it from the local police, which enabled tighter control. Furthermore, a household servant had to carry written permission from the master of the house whenever leaving the premises. The propagation of differentiation was visible also among young people, who needed permission from their parents when they wanted to leave the vicinity of their permanent place of residence to seek employment. If the parents were illiterate, they asked a literate friend or acquaintance to write the letter of permission. Those who had learnt the cultural techniques of reading and writing therefore played a significant role in facilitating their acquaintances and relatives’ mobility by acting as witnesses and scribes.

2.2 The Importance of Citizenship in Modern Nation-states

Wartime and other states of emergency brought stricter requirements pertaining to foreign passports and permits for internal travel. During the time of the First World War, detailed bureaucratic procedures for issuing passports were set forth by law. The strengthening bureaucracy altered relationships between ordinary people and state officials, facilitating the shift that was underway from feudal regimes to nascent nation-states. International passports were introduced in Finland, as in the rest of Europe, with reference to other certificates issued by the state. In the 1920s, the League of Nations held conferences and meetings on passports and customs formalities, impacting future standardisation practices. These reflected the immense importance of citizenship as the world became one of modern nation-states, as Andreas Fahrmeir (2001, p. 218) has pointed out—a concept which is defined and applied in highly country-specific ways. At this point, an individual’s words, reputation or appearance were no longer sufficient for obtaining a travel permit. Evidence contingent on local knowledge or community memory was not deemed appropriate anymore for socially categorising those allowed to travel from those could not. With the aid of bureaucratic documents, authorised by designated officials, the importance of individual-level judgement and beliefs was reduced.

The difficulty of acting and deciding from a distance necessitated chains of action, in which officials working in a central office—the bureaucracy’s so-called centres of calculation (Jons, 2011; Latour, 1987)—had to rely on local actants to provide trustworthy certificates regarding the applicants. Rather than situated principally in a single physical location, the centres of calculation that presided over determining an applicant’s adequacy were multi-nodal entities dispersed over a range of people and practices of inscription. All of these had to be mobilised to participate in, or at least not actively hinder, the processing of each specific passport application.

In the early twentieth century, applying for a passport was a two-step process. First the applicant needed to obtain a certificate of non-impediment from the local police. The police officer who provided this was also charged with identifying the applicant. The state church also kept track of all its members and granted a certificate of the applicants’ reputation and of their registration within a specific parish. Before freedom of religion became enshrined into Finnish law in 1923, the church registers covered nearly the entire population. Often, the priest's certificate vouched for the person being duly vaccinated, confirmed in the faith, a regular participant in communion and enjoying civic confidence (Haara & Lehmuskallio, 2020, p. 15). Sweeping political changes in the status of Finland, from being a part of Sweden to an autonomous duchy of the Russian Empire and then, in 1917, to becoming a republic did not eliminate the church’s role with regard to population records. While the government changed considerably, the church’s centrality in record-keeping remained. It held significant power in making judgements of citizens’ health information, decency and freedom of movement.

In the years following the Finnish Civil War of 1918, applicants needed to provide additional evidence of political credibility, because passports were not issued to those who had been Finnish Red Guard members—i.e. on the losing side. Such evidence could be issued, for example, by a certificate from ‘a well-known trusted person’, someone whose political allegiance seemed beyond doubt (Haara & Lehmuskallio, 2020, p. 29).

In addition to a certificate of reputation, those assessing suitability to receive a passport found importance in materials that documented that passport applicants were no threat to public order, had fulfilled their national service obligation and had not been criminally convicted. A certificate stating that the passport applicant had no outstanding taxes due was required until 1922. This certificate was required for advancing tax collection, and it demonstrates that belonging to a state was still perceived in terms of a subordinate relationship encompassing tax, military and other obligations. As for the national service obligation, a man of military age had to present a certificate from military headquarters that his service obligations did not prevent him from travelling abroad. This requirement is still in force today, to enforce military service and to ensure that Finland has sufficient armed forces in the event of war. It serves as an excellent reminder that passports are granted only under certain conditions and are not given automatically to all citizens of a country.

Once the applicant had gathered all the certificates required as evidence of having fulfilled all obligations to the state and being of good repute, they had to be attached to the passport application. One applied for a passport from the provincial government or another designated authority, which then issued the passport. It was the upper-level bureaucrats representing these bodies who were deemed capable to issue passports, with the aid of the police and other local actors.

Passports were used to control the movement of both people and money, partly to protect the national economy. Indeed, the way in which passport issuance was handled reflected the economic policy of the day and a country’s economic circumstances. In extreme cases, states could use passports to encourage the emigration of specific citizens or groups at certain points in history (Lucassen, 2001, p. 249), with emigration providing relief for national challenges related to unemployment or poverty. The reverse mechanism has also been employed: in times of labour shortages, for instance, passports were denied. In the late 1940s, some applicants in Finland were refused a passport for working abroad, because the country needed a strong workforce following the Second World War (Haara & Lehmuskallio, 2020, p. 33).

2.3 The Demand for Central Registers and Methods Standardisation

The application process has been consolidated with one official authority since 1960, when the Finnish police started to issue passports. This required the establishment of central registers, which the police could use to compile, compare and verify the information provided by applicants. Before, passport-related registers were scattered across multiple locations and maintained by local government entities, which often presented bottlenecks to centralisation. The local police, for example, kept their own registers of passports and certificates of non-impediment that they had granted. In addition, filing systems were not yet highly developed, and some officers made notes by hand in notebooks or simply by modifying the original forms. Although the passport application forms were very similar from one province to another, there were idiosyncratic ways of completing them. Via the introduction of standardised forms, with clear completion instructions aiding interpretation, it became possible to collect and store data consistently, then transmit a coherent set of data to a larger archive. Standardised forms are an important mechanism for methods standardisation (Star & Griesemer, 1989, p. 411): they are instrumental for the efforts to convey unchanging information and overcome local uncertainties. As our empirical material shows, methods standardisation is less straightforward than often assumed. Local negotiations related to proper use practices can be identified in our data for quite some time after further standardisation work.

The next key development came in the 1980s, when the requirement for separate documents attesting to one’s reputation were eliminated. This simplified applying for a foreign passport. The applicant now only had to fill in one form instead of several and bring two photographs and in the case of renewal an old passport. At this stage, the police still lacked direct access to the personal data in the population registers, but the local registrar, usually the vicar of the parish or a person appointed by the church’s general chaplain, copied an extract from the register onto the back of the application. As Marjo Rita Valtonen (2005, p. 173) has outlined, the 1960s had seen the police administration in Finland move from a ‘pen and paper’ culture to using typewriters for completing forms, but the passports issued at that time were still filled in using handwriting. Early forms of national information processing were introduced in the 1970s. In the 1980s, mechanical typewriters were replaced by electronic models, and electronic information and communication technologies came into wider use in work settings. Irrespective of the forms’ standardisation, lack of policy guidelines led to an eclectic mix of software and workstation environments within police departments. The police devoted considerable resources to technology and the development of information systems throughout the 1990s. Before the end of the decade, bespoke software and specific ICT devices were adopted force-wide. The number of workstations used in the police administration grew from roughly 200 in 1990 to 8500 just ten years later. While paper trails still remained, electronic registers now formed the backbone for correctly issuing passports.

2.4 The Centrality of the Finnish Population Information System

Today, after the introduction of machine-readable biometric passports, one can apply in Finland for either a standard passport or a seaman’s passport via the Internet. A separate printed extract from the population register is no longer needed, as the police now have constant access to it. Even a physical visit to a police licence-service desk is no longer required, as long as certain conditions for application are met and the applicant’s fingerprints and signature are on file from a previous passport, issued no more than six years earlier. Usually, applicants need to provide a new photograph, as the one submitted with the application must be no more than six months old. The photograph can be supplied electronically, however, and the police systems convert it into machine-readable format complying with the standards set for biometric face prints, including those issued by international bodies such as the International Civil Aviation Organization and the International Organization for Standardization.

The police receive the information for the passport directly from the Finnish Population Information System, which is the blueprint for the information required on each citizen and cannot be circumvented. It is a computerised national register that contains basic information about Finnish citizens and foreign citizens residing in Finland, whether on a permanent or a temporary basis. The personal data recorded in the system are the person’s name, personal identity code, home address, citizenship, native language, family relations and date of birth (and, where relevant, death) (Digital & Population Data Services Agency, 2020).

The Finnish Population Information System’s centrality for issuing passports has influenced the types of information collected about citizens and hence the data that can be shown on passports. Some previous identifiers, such as academic qualifications, work position and even height, have been deemed too variable and overly difficult to confirm from a distance for bureaucrats working at the centres of calculation. This is one of the major ways in which the development of centralised bureaucratic systems becomes visible in the passports themselves: several types of information included previously are not considered useful anymore for individuation, and officials find little to be gained from the erstwhile symbolic value of the passport as a token of mobility reserved for the upper classes.

Standardising the collection and management of information about citizens and storing it in a centralized archive has led to uniformity in previously disparate passport documents. Prior to this, information collection practices and the functions of passports were firmly rooted in the cooperation of local actors, including the applicant, with signs of these local negotiations visible in the official documents. Central electronic information systems and data processing have brought significant changes to the passport issuance process and, accordingly, to the control over individuals’ movement, largely because the authorities now receive information directly from a computing system without having to consult human intermediaries. Furthermore, the expansion of passport control mechanisms continued even when they were transferred from the municipal to the national level; with the arrival of the European passport (introduced in Finland in 1997), they reached EU level. Since the terrorist attacks on 11th September 2001, the US authorities have had a particularly significant impact on these once-local travel documents, succeeding in their push to get machine-readable biometric identifiers implemented beyond the US, including in EU passports.

Traditionally, passports guarantee that the bearer receives support from the issuing state, which is why passports continue to serve in a sense as letters of reference. An EU passport extends this right, giving its holder a specific transnational EU-wide citizenship that allows travel in a wider area than a national passport (as per the Schengen Agreement). This passport regime harmonised the parameters of the passport documents (Salter, 2003, p. 85), after transnational arrangements for the control of movement emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War. However, as the various border closures amid the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 have demonstrated, individual nation-states’ borders still matter as do some local or municipal ones. For example, restrictions of movement in 2020 followed county borders, when the Finnish government closed the border between the Uusimaa region and the rest of Finland, evoking travel restrictions familiar only from the nineteenth century and times of war.

3 Bodily Traces in Passports

We have outlined how changes in bureaucracy have significantly affected the way passports are applied for, who is invited to assess an applicant's credibility, and the kinds and nature of the information collected, thus presenting evidence of considerable variety in the co-operation involved. Now, we will address how the human body has been called upon to participate in the creation of a passport for enabling movement across borders.

A passport can only fulfil its function of opening doors across borders, if the human body is linked to it in a reliable way. As identification methods have evolved and control increased, the body’s relationship to the passport has been in a constant state of flux.

3.1 The Pre-photographic Period—Nineteenth Century to First World War

Early passports were intended to guarantee unrestricted passage for travellers. They were permits that allowed the holder to travel from one geographical area to another. While the prestige of the entity issuing the permit and the importance of the document were highlighted by the use of stamps and signatures, the information on the passport holder was relatively scarce: often only the name and place of residence featured in the passport, stated by the issuer. Therefore, the traces of bodies that had to be visible were those of the issuers, since they were considered as most important, attesting to their authority to issue a passport. As stated above, early passports were first and foremost a recommendation letter, anchored in the authority and weight behind the issuer.

Until the late nineteenth century, passport holders were rarely identified by visual means: their personal details were mostly limited to their name, occupation and academic standing (if any). People with a higher social status or in certain positions enjoyed preferential treatment and possessed greater freedom of movement. It was therefore important for applicants to indicate their social class, even if only implicitly.

Under these circumstances, it was very difficult, if not impossible, for officials at border crossings to identify the passport bearer and to verify the correspondence of the traveller’s body with the accompanying documents based on these alone. When a situation required the identification of a person, their physical appearance, clothing and other external attributes were scrutinised in addition to the documentation they carried. Border officials paid particular attention to speech acts—not just what was said, but also how it was said. When an individual travelled with a Finnish passport, the bearer's name needed to match a specific style and possibly dialect, and knowledge of Finnish, Swedish, Russian, German and/or French may have been expected, in line with the occupation stated in the travel document. Passports were also heavily gendered and predominantly issued for male travellers, who were thought to possess embodied skills and a specific habitus, depending on their social position. This knowledge was not restricted to specific individuals, but it was social and class-based. Members of the same class may well have been able to use each other’s travel documents without detection.

According to Finland’s first passport legislation, dating from 1862, anyone crossing state borders had to carry a passport, and issuing passports for international travel was restricted primarily to the counties’ administrative boards.

3.2 The Introduction of Photographs—First World War to the 1950s

After the outbreak of the First World War, the identification of individuals became key. The passport remained a document intended to enable travel and trade, but distrust against foreigners caused by the war heightened the importance of distinguishing between trustworthy people and spies or other undesirable individuals. Rather than focusing on the bearer’s physical attributes alone, the scrutinising gaze shifted to the passport, which now had the function of an identification document, confirming that the individual was who they claimed to be. The race to ensure the authenticity of passports and to prevent their misuse had begun. To link the right person to the document, the passport had to include the holder's signature, a physical description and a photograph as proof of the close connection between the body and the document.

Passports still displayed great variety of forms. Some photographs emphasised the person's prestige or presented an idealised portrait instead of primarily enabling accurate recognition. A studio portrait, a picture taken by the village photographer and a face clipped from a wedding photograph were equally acceptable passport photographs.

3.3 1960–2005: Structuring of the Face

In the early 1960s, the visual representation of the face in the passport became simpler and more standardised. It was therefore easier to match the individual to the document, which was of particular benefit when the official checking the document had very little time for the task. Passport photographs now more closely resembled ‘mugshots’ taken of those arrested by the police: cropped to show only the face, with a neutral expression and the gaze directed at the camera (for historical takes on police photography, see e.g. Regener, 1999; Meyer, 2019).

Just as much as the form, the text used to document a person's physical appearance was standardised in this period. For instance, hair and eye colour had to be selected from a list. However, the strict categories presented problems and, during this early period of implementation, it was not unusual to find that two or even three colours had been chosen in an effort to convey a more accurate colour match.

Physical descriptions of this kind were used alongside the photograph, until passports became machine-readable towards the end of the 1980s. Identity numbers had been added to Finnish passports in the late 1970s, tying them to a broader system first developed for social welfare. With the inclusion of identity numbers, officials could unambiguously confirm the identity created by the state and retrieve data relating to the person from digital records.

3.4 2006 and After: The Machine-Readable Biometric Passport

Since 2006, every new Finnish passport features a biometric faceprint in digital form, and biometric fingerprints have been included since 2009 (except for children under 12 years). In this period of electronic machine-readable biometric passports, the face is an increasingly important element for personal identification. Accordingly, strict instructions are given about the background allowed in the photograph, the person’s head measurements and positioning. The facial features—particularly the eyes—must be clearly distinguishable within the photograph.

The issuer’s name or signature is no longer shown in the passport, while that of the passport-holder is. A specimen signature is provided electronically via a writing surface at the application office, stored in the national passport register and laser-engraved into the passport. Hence, the applicant is not allowed to physically alter the document in any way, even by signing it in the way customary since the post-war years.

The standardisation of the facial photograph makes visual identification of the person easier, but it also affords machine-assisted facial recognition, based on a face image stored on a microchip embedded in the passport and respective biometric data kept in a passport register maintained by the police. The computer-aided facial recognition now used at borders, but also by smartphones, access control to buildings and the like raises the question whether the biometric identification linked to passports is helping to normalise machine-assisted surveillance in society (for a discussion on the wider societal spread of facial recognition technologies, see Gates, 2011; Norval & Prasopoulou, 2017; Introna & Nissenbaum, 2017). This is one factor in countries’ varying solutions for the data stored within passports and kept in passport registers, as some countries tend to curb the use of these technologies for other societal purposes, or have decided to not have passport registers at all.

4 Discussion: Four Modes of Cooperation

The interrelations among bodies, traces, documents, and official registers have shifted throughout the history of the Finnish passport, depending on the passports’ main uses and on whose gaze and whose bodily traces had to be connected to them as documents and thereby enabled these to act as a viable medium of movement.

In the discussion below, we will highlight the ways in which specific practices of cooperation have been upheld and, at times, enforced in the four periods outlined above, as revealed by our empirical research. These remain visible today in the traces left in passport application forms and the passport documents themselves.

In the pre-photographic period, when passports were mainly letters of recommendation rather than means of identification, there was no uniform passport design. Their main commonality in form was that they were made with paper printed specifically for passport use. These passports bore diverse stamps and seals that implied the presence of representatives of the state, who had held the stamps in their hands and affixed seals to specific parts of the passport for purposes of representation (see Fig. 7.1). Some stamps were applied by the issuer of the passport, serving as the signature of a social body and also as tokens of hierarchical and other social relations among issuing entities. Other stamps testify to the passport holder’s movement and were added upon the presentation of the passport to a border guard or other officials during the holder’s journey. These stamps informed other authorities that the passport had been presented to an individual representing a larger social body and, hence, that the bearer had a right to travel or stay by virtue of a connection to that social body. These markings provide a concrete example of a passport’s function as a portable register of sorts, holding information about the social relationships in which the individual continues to be embedded while travelling.

Fig. 7.1

Source The National Archives in Oulu, the archives of the magistrate of Raahe

Early passports were letters of recommendation rather than means of identification. Therefore, they contained more information about the issuing authority than about their holder. This passport from 1863 contains only the holder’s name, profession and citizenship (“Finnish subordinate”). Recording of person’s physical characteristics in a Finnish passport was not very common in the nineteenth century, although some passport formulae had allotted space for doing so.

Also of relevance are the additional inscriptions required in the early twentieth century for both Finns and foreigners. For instance, the police or another authority made a note on the passport attesting there were no impediments to the individual leaving Finland, and this note received a stamp. Likewise, stamps were required for arrivals in Finland. The Aliens Decree of 1919, for instance, required foreign arrivals to have a visa stamp for travel to Finland in their passport, obtained from a Finnish diplomatic representative in their country of origin. From the mid-nineteenth century until the First World War, Russia and its Grand Duchy of Finland were one of the few places in Europe where strict passport and visa requirements restricted travel (Lucassen, 2001, p. 236; Salter, 2003, p. 40; Leitzinger, 2008). Restricting issuing visas was a means of barring entry to any person suspected to be a spy or criminal, or to those considered to have insufficient funds to sustain themselves during their visit, even if they had a passport from their country of origin. The state wanted to avoid both threats to public safety and any potential burden to the social welfare system. More generally, it wanted control over the terms under which individuals would be allowed into the country.

In that period, the only signatures in passports were from representatives of social bodies, identifiable by their handwriting as specific individuals. Importantly, in our empirical material, the body of the traveller for whom a passport was issued did not sign it and was therefore physically absent from the passport document. The bodies who left their traces in the document were those of state officials, either anonymous representatives of a social body present via stamps and seals or specific individuals who had climbed high enough on the professional ladder to be symbolically present via their handwriting as a specific person.

With the outbreak of the First World War, connecting a particular body to a passport document became a key motive for further passport development. Now not only the bodily trace of representatives was of concern, but also the question how to ensure that the passport was carried by the right person.

In light of this priority, techniques for recording traces of a passport holder in a passport became—and continue to be—an important area for development. From 1914, Finns were required to have a photograph attached to their passport if they wished to travel abroad. To cross state borders, the passport applicant had to hand in two photographs to the state authorities, one to be retained in the local archives and one for the passport document itself. The photograph requirement was made permanent by a government decree on Finnish passports in 1919, on account of the value associated with the photograph as an assumed direct connection between the passport and its holder. It tied the traveller’s body, mediated via a camera, to its bureaucratic representation. The requirement of a photograph also responded to international rules for travel, as during the First World War an increasing number of countries began to ask for photographs within passports they would accept as official travel documents.

In contrast to the photographs taken of criminals, there was no requirement for passport photographs to adhere to a strict visual form. The pictures used came in various sizes and showed a host of poses, some of which made the person depicted impossible to identify. The mechanical objectivity conferred by the camera as a specific technical device was deemed proof enough of having created this particular connection between body and document.

Another new requirement was the applicant’s signature. It became easier for people to sign once everyone had both a first name and a surname after the law on surnames was passed in 1920, which harmonised the various surname practices in Finland. This was prompted by the need for a more rigorous identification of citizens, not least because of the damage caused during the Finnish Civil War and the First World War. The Finnish population had taken opposing sides during these wars, so that after Finland’s independence in 1917 the winning side had great interest in identifying their earlier enemies. Moreover, considerable investments in education had brought literacy to the majority of the population (Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2020). In early passports, such as the one shown in Fig. 7.2, from 1917, the applicant’s name was signed across the photograph provided. This was one mechanism for ensuring, through handwriting, that the photograph indeed showed the person described by the passport. Additionally, the photograph received the police commissioner’s stamp as a proof that a representative of the commissioner had physically inspected and touched both the photograph and the document. Finally, the signed and stamped photograph was given a seal, which made it more difficult to change the photograph that was now part of the passport. Such tampering had been commonplace with the first passports containing photographs.

Fig. 7.2

Source The National Archives in Helsinki, biographical material

In the early twentieth century, issuing passports was centralized to upper level bureaucrats working at provincial governments. However, the police was still responsible for identifying the applicant correctly, verifying that the applicant was who they claimed to be. The passport depicted is issued in 1917, containing a separate sheet of paper glued on it, where an officer from the Helsinki Police Department has verified the authenticity of the bearer’s photograph and signature. In addition, the passport holder has written his signature on the passport photo, thus contributing to the validation of his identity in both handwritten and photographic form.

It took quite some time before the signature penned by the applicant was allocated a specific space in the document. This change, which our empirical material places at roughly the same time as the advent of passport photographs, is significant in terms of the bodies coming into contact with the document used as a medium of movement.

While the holder’s traces on the document gained importance, the largest signatures found in the passports of the day were still those of issuing authorities, such as those of representatives of the provincial government and the police commissioner. The authorities began to collect bodily traces of passport applicants for the purpose of individuation, but the passport was still principally a letter of reference provided by established authority representatives whose physical touch needed to be visible on the document (see Fig. 7.3).

Fig. 7.3

In the beginning of the twentieth century, physical description, signature and photograph became central techniques for bridging the gap between the body, identity, and its representation in passports. In this passport issued in 1948, an officer from the Helsinki Police Department has verified with his signature that the photo and the signature of the passport holder are genuine. The National Archives in Helsinki, biographical material.

Only in the 1960s both the form and the visual content of the passport photograph had become sufficiently standardised to assist the authorities in identifying and remembering individuals in identification situations. The apparent simplification of the photograph was designed to draw attention to the features that distinguished an individual from all others, emphasising the use of biometrics for individuation rather than for representative purposes. Our empirical evidence disproves the common assumption in related literature that conventions for visual identification in passport photographs, as outlined perhaps most famously by Bertillon, were adopted relatively early (for Bertillon’s image logics, see Ellenbogen, 2012). It was only in the 1960s that highly specific regulations regarding passport photographs were issued, and the requirements have been tightened ever since. Various actors with little understanding of identification techniques were required to conform to the stricter standards for passport photographs (see Fig. 7.4). For instance, specific instructions for ‘correct’ photographs in line with this aim were sent to the photography studios that usually provided these images. The studios and later (with advances in camera technology and greater affordability and ease of use of appropriate cameras) people taking their own passport photographs at home had to be able to learn how to take photographs correctly, without learning details of identification. For this reason, the guidelines provided needed to be standardised, stringent and simple (see Star & Griesemer, 1989, p. 406).

Fig. 7.4

Source The National Archives in Helsinki, biographical material

A person must be registered in the population information system in order to obtain a personal identity number. It distinguishes an individual from all other individuals and makes it possible for the authorities to receive personal data directly from electronic computing systems. The personal identity number (“social security number” or “code”) has been documented in the Finnish passport since the mid-1970s.

With the introduction of machine-readable passports in Finland in 1987, stamps and other hand-made inscriptions began to disappear from passports, with the exception of those added during travelling, notations about the amount of stamp duty or about exceeding the predefined space allocated for a particular item of necessary information. The demand for machine-readability has also led to a preference for the general anonymisation of the people involved in the process of applying for, verifying and issuing passports. Absent too are any specific issuer names or signatures within the passport, which were included right up until the introduction of machine-readability. Since 1987, the passport has been issued by a social body, such as the Helsinki police department, rather than by its individual representatives, such as a police commissioner known in society by a personal name. While the applicant’s body has been increasingly included into physical passport documents with the integration of photographs and signatures (during and after the First World War), the move to machine-readability has distanced the issuers’ bodies from these documents and added several mediating steps between the applicant’s body and representation in the document.

Since electronically machine-readable passports were introduced in Finland in 2006, adding material invisible to the human eye, the applicant’s body is inscribed in a novel form into the document (see Fig. 7.5). Although the passport still contains, in visible form, the same information offered by machine-readable passports issued since 1987, the microchip containing biometric information on the passport holder allows the use of machines to decipher information identifying the bearer, such as a digital face image stored in a machine-readable form and digitally decipherable fingerprints. The body of the passport applicant has been turned into a marker, which can be sensed by ‘smart cameras’ (Kember, 2014). This body surveillance (Lyon, 2001) adds a fourth mode of cooperation in the history of the passport as a medium of movement as outlined above. Through the biometric verification of travellers at borders, the image continues to fulfil both representational and operational purposes, while still serving as the principal way of connecting passports to those carrying them upon examination. Visual technologies therefore play an important role for inscribing means of symbolic bordering (Chouliaraki, 2017) into material documents and normalising practices of social sorting.

Fig. 7.5

Source The Police Museum’s collection

E-passports, such as this model passport design from 2012, has an embedded electronic chip which contains the bearer’s biometric information. A digital photograph of the face and digital fingerprints are also stored in the national passport register.

5 Conclusions

Increasingly, document controls and other bureaucratic procedures designed to prevent unwanted migration are being strengthened and rationalised (Torpey, 2018, p. 192). Central to this has been the standardisation of travel documents, including regular technology upgrades intended to facilitate comparisons across numerous registers and databases and to make it difficult to counterfeit or manipulate passports. Unified databases and centralised data processing have produced greater uniformity in passport documents, enabling certain locally developed solutions to be scaled up for global use. The centres of calculation have also become more uniform, relying ever less on human operators to handle the data during transfer from one point to another. Today’s Finnish passports contain only information on the passport holder that can be obtained directly from the Finnish Population Information System, so neither applicants nor issuers can make changes to the information in the document without these changes already present in the system. For instance, if there is an error in the Population Information System data, the necessary changes need to be recorded in a database before the passport can be issued. Ultimately, the printed passport is just a visible token of a much broader, vast information infrastructure, in which the various intermediate societal bodies handling the documentation are no longer visible as individuals.

In addition to storing information in computerised databases and providing access to it, the development of information technology has facilitated increased information sharing across a wide spectrum of stakeholders. Globally interoperable systems are needed for processing data obtained from other kinds of systems, in use by other countries, that encourage trust over greater distances. Hence, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a transnational actor, has issued standard specifications for passports, and there are ISO standards developed for operations such as capturing faceprints and fingerprints (e.g. the above-mentioned ISO/IEC standard), with the aim of sharing them among a variety of systems independently of any single provider. Consequently, international standards, in particular those defined by the ISO and ICAO, specify general properties that passports must possess, such as certain ones for the biometric elements of the ‘ePassport’. Accordingly, developers, designers and suppliers of passport-related technology must take into account international standards and regulations related to these elements (e.g. security features) while participating in their continual development. Passport standards (alongside data protection laws) smooth the friction between viewpoints; after all, the main interests of passports’ developers and manufacturers lie not in regulating mobility or protecting privacy as such but in providing means of cooperation among various stakeholders who may not agree with each other (see also Häkli, 2015). The associated perspective on mediation as negotiation among several stakeholders has been developed by scholars interested in the negotiation of work (e.g. Bowker et al., 2016; Schüttpelz, 2017; Schüttpelz & Thielmann, 2013)—negotiation that we have laid bare through archival documents and interviews that we have begun conducting on the history of the Finnish passport.

While the notion of immutable mobiles as well as that of boundary objects are helpful in considering the roles that passports play in social lives, passports are first and foremost media of movement, used within varying regimes of negotiating a right to travel. As our brief history of Finland’s passports has shown, the passport as a medium of movement has not been as immutable as one might assume, but neither has it allowed for excessive localisation. Its history has witnessed both practices that have long remained relatively fixed as well as frequent variation in ways of applying for, issuing, and controlling passports. In Finland, these can be traced from the early nineteenth century to today in terms of four modes of cooperation or four passport regimes, along the following development lines: how citizens apply for a passport, with whose consent, and how the means of demonstrating qualifications for receiving a passport have changed. It has been a slow, but inevitable process from emphasising the visibility of the issuers’ actual handling of the documents to inscribing the applicant's body within the passport, in tandem with slowly but surely removing any trace of an individual issuer and then refusing to let the applicant touch a passport without the touch having been registered via a biometric identifier and verified as authentic by an additional step of mediation.

Reflecting on the passport as a medium of movement allows one to gain a more thorough understanding of the kinds of mobilities outlined by Sheller and Urry, by pinpointing the constraints, the rerouting and the negotiations in which one has to be involved if wishing to travel at all. Equally, our reflections function as an empirically grounded example of the landscape of variations in which practices of cooperation are embedded. They therefore remind of the contingency of our current passport regime, one that has already been ‘rewired’ since the beginning of 2020 to include health information in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a response echoing restrictions in the 1940s due to tuberculosis, scabies and diphtheria. However, just as COVID-19 is traced and verified today at border crossings in novel ways, in the future passport regimes may be verified by actants we cannot even yet imagine.