Passport Photos and the Polaroid Miniportrait 403R

I've finally managed to buy a Polaroid 403R from eBay. These cameras were used up until fairly recently to take passport-photos manually, but have now been phased out by machines or digital cameras. I think when trying to study identity and anonymity the passport image is key. The passport image is the identity on paper, it is recognised in bureaucracy as the proof that the person who owns the document exists and that their image and the information printed in the passport match. That there is no directly interposing negative, that the image is exposed directly onto the polaroid film is also linked in with validity, there can be no tampering with the image after it is made, the light reacts chemically with the film and the image is created.The camera comes with a built in angled flash and two fixed focussing distances, 1.2m and 1.92m, this means that every image taken with the camera will look fairly consistent with the preceding and following images, particularly when photographing the face. Though there are more complex lighting set-ups for the passport photograph, as in the diagram below, I have found that taking the images with the flash pointing directly at the subject on a white background is similar enough to the passport style for my purposes.

The image below is a grid of six 3.25" x 4.25" polaroid images. The camera has three settings for taking photographs, you can set it to take four separate images, two and two the same or all four the same. Though these photographs are only my playing and experimenting with the camera I have some more specific intentions for the next set which should be more relevant to my project.