Posted on by Thomas Patterson

On the perils of having a common name

Here’s new work for the NYT and The Markup on ruined reputations and de facto identity theft due to faulty automated background screenings. Samantha Johnson of St. Helens, Ore., shares a name and birthday with a felon in Minnesota, and the actions of that other Samantha Johnson have hurt Oregon’s Samantha Johnson during background checks regarding housing and employment.

Somewhere in Minnesota, there is a woman with the exact full name and birthdate as Samantha Johnson, a woman in St. Helens, Ore. As a result, the Samantha Johnson in Oregon must regularly work to clean her credit reports, purging evidence of the other Samantha Johnson’s wrongdoing. Photography by Thomas Patterson for The Markup and The New York Times.

As it was a portrait assignment not on deadline, I used both medium format monochrome film and digital cameras, giving the editors a stylistic choice. They chose the color portraits, but maybe I’m kind of partial to the old-school squares.