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Who is this dapper gentleman? Who was the photographer who composed this photo? And what is the subject waiting for?

We can assume he's waiting to be fingerprinted. This is a mugshot from the New South Wales Police in Sydney, Australia, taken probably sometime in the 1930s. It's part of the Justice & Police Museum collection,and held by Historic Houses Trust. The collection has, according to the HHT website, an estimated 130,000 images from between 1910 and 1960.

From Historic Houses Trust, Justice & Police Museum collection

Here we see Walter Smith, a man whose face has a lot of character. In the context of mugshots, we consider him a potentially dangerous fellow, but how much does the context influence our impressions of this man? The scars on his nose and chin, the deep lines in his forehead, the offset jaw, and the intense stare tell a story of a man with a hard life, one who has probably been in numerous fist fights, but possibly (if we didn't know he was under arrest here) just another hard-working man of the 30s. Neither of these photos, or the many other beautiful photographs seen here, fit the genre of a contemporary mugshot:

Mugshot from The Smoking Gun