The passport photograph demonstrates the working of the ‘microphysics of power’ at two levels. First, the very concept of the passport is disciplinary, facilitating social regulation by tracing the movement of bodies both within and across national boundaries, and establishing inclusion in or exclusion from the citizen body of a given state. Secondly, the subject is in part constituted in apparatus, right down to the most intimate bodily performances. An undisciplined smirk at the wrong moment and the legal validity of the photograph vanishes.