Every mugshot tells a story, but can it ever tell the full story?

PRESENT TENSE:The unsettling image of a shaven-headed assassin has gripped the world, but it offers few clues about the true nature of violence

BACK IN 1976 the image of a deranged political assassin achieved lasting iconic status. With gun in hand, a demented grin and an intimidating shaved mohican, the image swiftly came to symbolise the potential for latent violence in a fraying, tense urban landscape.

Fast-forward to 2011 and we have another image of latent violence to process, in which another political assassin stares manically into the camera, smirk fixed to his face, hair and eyebrows shaved, a triumphant valedictory glint in his eyes.

The difference, of course, is that the first is fictional and the second all too real: the mohican belongs to Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle, the disturbed loner in Martin Scorsese's classic Taxi Driver; the shaved head appears in the unsettling mugshot of the alleged Arizona shooter Jared Lee Loughner, currently starring in news bulletins and headlines around the world.

The attempted assassination of the US congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the murder of six others has been a grim start to the year’s news cycle, but in this highly mediated age, when breaking stories tend to adhere to well-worn narrative conventions, it has played out all too predictably. How many of us were subconsciously waiting for the inevitable reveal of the mugshot, the grand unveiling of the story’s villain, preparing to be either disappointed by how incongruous he looked or satisfied by how deranged he seemed? By that measure, at least, Loughner’s mugshot is a success, for, like so many mugshots before, it has quickly become a kind of visual shorthand for inexplicable evil.

Where Bickle’s iconic status is a result of a cult film, real-life murderers and felons have a much briefer opportunity to make such an impression: the moment of shutter release when their face is recorded for criminal posterity. In Loughner’s case his leering grin and intense stare are evidently as much part of his performance as his murderous rampage in Tucson, Arizona.

The modern mugshot must bear an extraordinary weight; in the most heinous cases the face of the perpetrator often becomes the chief visual reminder of the crimes and a cruel challenge to our ability to understand irrational violence. These images demand interpretation, as if they can somehow explain violence itself, but all they can do is offer clues of our own imagining. The answers are rarely satisfactory.

The catalogue of famous felonious portraits is long and ignoble. Charles Manson’s photograph is probably the most notorious of all, those eyes wild and full of menace. His power, such as it was, had everything to do with exerting malign influence on the easily led, which makes it all the more depressing when that infamous mugshot is worn on badges and T-shirts as some naive statement of rebellion.

In Britain the most notorious mugshot is easily that of Myra Hindley, with the tower of peroxide-blond hair over her intensely staring face. The awful nature of her crimes has imbued the picture with a singular, disconcerting power; it is revealing that Ian Brady’s police photograph is nowhere near as recognisable, for it is the violence of a woman towards children that is so grotesque and, unfortunately, compelling. The artist Marcus Harvey, whose refashioning of the mugshot using children’s handprints understandably caused so much controversy in the mid 1990s, realised this all too well.

Last year another mugshot from the past was back in circulation, another invitation to interpret the face of “evil”. When Jon Venables, one of the two young boys who murdered the Liverpool toddler James Bulger in 1993, was returned to prison in March of last year the police photograph from the original case featured on every news bulletin and was published on the cover of every newspaper in the UK. If the image of the innocent-looking 10-year-old boy was framed on a mantelpiece, say, we would interpret his face entirely differently, but that gaze is now inextricably linked to a horrific crime and, as such, has become an avatar of youthful malevolence.

Many of the most famous mugshots, of course, belong to the rich and famous. The celebrity mugshot is a subgenre of its own, with an entire industry of websites cataloguing the indiscretions of the stars. Many are mundane, but a few become famous photographs in their own right: Nick Nolte looking wild and unkempt, Jane Fonda with her left fist raised, a fresh-faced young Bill Gates with oversized 1970s shades, a coy, posing Paris Hilton. Lindsay Lohan has enough pouting mugshots to put together an album, though how much difference there is between LiLo’s mugshots and the paparazzi snaps that pad out celebrity magazines is open to question. The excruciating embarrassment etched on the face of Hugh Grant in his seminal 1995 portrait will forever define how we see the foppish actor. Most bizarre of all is Michael Jackson’s quizzical expression in his 2003 mugshot after his arrest for alleged child molestation – the full extent of his physical transformation was never more clear, the decline in his fortunes never more apparent.

The fascination with the celebrity mugshot is mostly a form of Schadenfreude, but the images of notorious criminals fascinate in a different way altogether, possibly because of what we can never know about them. There is, after all, a comfort in Travis Bickle. He’s fictional, most importantly; also, we have an entire well-crafted movie that affords us an opportunity to understand what fuels his violent rage. With the likes of Loughner, Manson and Hindley, on the other hand, all we get is a face in a photograph.

Shane Hegarty is on leave. Ross O’Carroll-Kelly is back next week