A so-called 'Bertillon' mugshot---pre-fingerprint technology.
Bertillon was a French detective who devised a system for taking cranial measurements etc to establish
identity.
Don't have the card in front of me so I
can't check the name of the woman here (usually with Bertillon cards it's on the back--along
with crime one has been accused of). Her occupation listed as 'waitress' but
something in her look tells me it's a case of 'Maggie, A Girl of the Streets.'
Almost
too much disparate information to process here. The slightly collapsed
look of mouth/chin: a reminder of how awful people's teeth still were,
even at the beginning of the 20th c.
And, yes: an American
mugshot--from either California or Oregon as I recall--but still one can't
help gawping at the date: August 14, 1914. World War One had just begun
in Belgium and the north of France and was starting in on its third surprisingly bloody and horrible week.