Vie d’Alphonse Bertillon #17

From the Getty Museum record

> But when identification through means of anthropometry turned out to be infallible, they [the bandits] were forced to become disillusioned. Alphonse Bertillon was the target of violent hatred. He could not cross prison courts without hearing cries for vengeance. Grimacing faces would stick out between window bars, threatening fists would shake about in emptiness, and shouts of insults would pour out. Bertillon would pass by with a tranquil step, as if he were deaf. And so abusive letters, anonymous, of course, were sent to his home, to the prefecture, to his office, wherever they might have a chance of reaching him. They never altered his sense of calm, and he threw them away with contempt. However Maly was affected by them; she was afraid that her husband would be the victim of an attack. Her fears, alas, were not imaginary. How many times, looking out from the window to see Alphonse Bertillon crossing the Avenue de Trocadéro, did she see two or three shadows creeping out from the shadows to follow him? > 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