Age Progressions

AGE PROGRESSIONS of adults are pretty much what they sound like: “He’s been gone for 15 years, so take this photo and make him look like he’s 50 years old and balding.” These are done in cases of endangered missing adults as well as fugitives, all in the hopes of generating renewed public interest and fresh leads for investigators.

I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but forensic artists don’t have any special gifts or psychic ability to predict what someone will look like in the future. What we do have is in-depth knowledge of facial anatomy, we’ve studied aging patterns of the face, and we have the artistic ability to illustrate those changes. Barring any new specific information about a person’s appearance, it comes down to educated guesswork.  It’s sort of like the cliché in any time travel movie: what we produce is a vision of one possible future. Any number of things along the way can change the outcome.

So why bother with an age progression in the first place? Because the investigator has a case that’s gone cold, and an age-progressed image can be just the thing that heats it up again. It can provide a fresh look to a case that many people have long forgotten, and can be enough to get the media interested as well. Which is exactly what the investigator is after.

To create an age-progressed image, whether by retouching the photo or doing a drawing, an artist follows the same basic protocol. First, you try to get as much information on the person as possible, such as their lifestyle, genetics, occupation, etc. The more information, the better.

This is because you would age someone differently if they were an outdoorsy and athletic person, versus someone that had an office job and was prone to overweight.  Every forensic artist should have a strong knowledge of anatomy, and keen observational skills. For instance, there can be extremely subtle differences in how a person looks change from their 30’s into their 40’s. An artist needs to make the image look real and believeable, and not just an image where it looks like wrinkles have been painted on.

Whether hand drawn or produced with the use of Photoshop, age progressions are just one of several possible “looks’ that a person may have when they age. Forensic artists are not psychic, and there is no guarantee that what is produced will look 100%, or even 75% of what the person may look like when apprehended. But, with a motivated law enforcement team putting the image out there to the public, this can often generate enough interest that people will take a second look, and call in a lead.

Every forensic artist has a story to tell where the detective hits a dead end on their investigation, and is now pinning their hopes that an artist’s age progression will get their case on the evening news, or the granddaddy of them all, America’s Most Wanted. Twenty years of searching have often come to an abrupt, satisfying end for the investigator just minutes after their fugitive’s image flashes on screen.

AGE PROGRESSIONS of children come with their own special set of circumstances. Needless to say, the aging process for adults is vastly different than that of children, so the method for producing an age-progressed image of a child is different as well. Instead of lifestyle changes, artists must depict the proportional changes of a child’s growth. This requires specialized knowledge, and ideally, specific input from the missing child’s parents and siblings. Many cases of child abductions are a result of custody disputes so this input isn’t always available, but continually updated images of the missing child are a way to help keep the search alive, and in the public’s memory.