Portrait of Unknown Children (San Francisco Chinatown)

In the second half of the 1970s, a trend emerged for photobooth-style computer-generated portraits printed with a dot-matrix printer. At a time when very few people had access to a personal computer, such portraits—often offered as souvenirs at tourist sites—were a novel attraction that sparked popular interest in computing technology. 

The portraits in this collection, mostly of anonymous individuals, were produced at a range of locations, which were usually printed (along with dates, names, and phrases) in the margins of the image. The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, for example, ran a program called “Portraits by Computer” in which anyone could either have their picture taken at an on-site location or mail in an existing photo to be converted to a 14-by-14 inch printout. Other portraits are labeled with locations including San Francisco’s Chinatown; Newmarket, Philadelphia; and the CN Tower in Toronto. 

The companies and systems behind these portraits varied, but the technical components were similar. As explained in promotional material for “Portraits by Computer,” the process was based on a technology developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory “to clarify fuzzy television transmissions” from space missions. 

A video digitizer would be used to convert an image captured by a TV camera into a pixel grid stored in the memory of a computer. The computer would then print the digital image using a dot-matrix printer, which would often translate the pixels into characters, so that the results recall ASCII art. In the case of “Portraits by Computer,” the images were 14,400 (120 by 120) pixels, correspondingly printed as 14,400 characters at a rate of 350 per second.