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The first known photograph of a person is said to have been taken by Louis Daguerre in 1838 or 1839. The widespread use of photography to record the faces of criminals, however, didn't catch on until the 1880s. According to the Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, the legal system's delay in making full use of the new technology was due in part to the high cost and complexity of photography at the time and in part to the unresolved question of whether an image could actually function as evidence in a court of law.
Enter Alphonse Bertillon. Bertillon, a clerk in the Prefecture of Police of Paris in the late 1870s, invented the mug shot as we know it: a pair of photographs taken with a standardized pose and angle (one front shot, one profile shot) under standardized lighting conditions. The photographs were to be attached to an identification card that would also record anthropometric data—length of left pinky finger, for example—as well as descriptions of eye color, hair color, skin color, build, and identifying marks.