Vie d’Alphonse Bertillon #09

From the Getty Museum record

> “A good-for-nothing,” he thought, "fallen from his rank, that’s what he’ll be. If ever he enters into a Faculty, it will be as an old man. I’ve sacrificed so much for him and the end result is terrible! He’ll only strive for tiny situations. Ah! What a son! What a son! What a strange son!” Finally the poor doctor decided to make the hardest and painful sacrifice: keeping Alphonse at home. He had to resort to the strongest threats to force his rascal of a son to go to the Louis-le-Grand school and to stay there. [. . .] Now he had become more serious and started to feel shameful when he saw his friends and brothers succeed while he remained the eternal dried fruit. He passed his baccalauréats in literature and in science, but at the age of twenty! His family joyfully greeted his belated success. > Transcript of the audio that accompanies this photograph. The excerpt is from Suzanne Bertillon, *Life of Alphonse Bertillon: Inventor of Anthropometry* (Paris: Gallimard, 1941) as translated by Emmelene Landon and published in Stéphanie Solinas, *Sans Titre, M. Bertillon* (Paris: RVB Books, 2011). Text © Suzanne Bertillon, Gallimard. All rights reserved. In the 1880s Frenchman Alphonse Bertillon (1853-1914), an employee at the Paris Prefecture of Police, developed a method to identify repeat criminals that involved photographing and taking measurements of the individuals. He also introduced photography as a crucial tool in crime scene investigations. His theories and techniques have evolved into the multitude of methods of identification that are used on us all today. For the series Untitled (M. Bertillon), Stéphanie Solinas turned the tables on Bertillon by photographing sites of importance from his life as if she were studying crime scenes. Each of the twenty-three photographs has an audio component—an excerpt from Bertillon’s biography written by his niece Suzanne Bertillon (see the excerpt above). Solinas describes this series as “spoken pictures.” She also ran two mugshot-type portraits of Bertillon’s face and profile through facial analysis software to re-create a three-dimensional photographic sculpture [2023.55] that captures his piercing gaze. Carolyn Peter, J. Paul Getty Museum, Department of Photographs, 2024