Portraits to Passports: Identity Documents in Sports-Media - Daniele Iannucci

Year
2025
Organisation
Summary

This research reframes standardized sports images as functional identity documents, showing how athlete portraits in media resemble passport-style photography and encode biometric and national data. Tracing their origins to 19th-century portraiture, it argues these images shape public perceptions of identity and contributed to the historical development of modern identification systems.