Vie d’Alphonse Bertillon #02

From the Getty Museum record

> The house the Bertillons lived in, located on 2 rue de la Réunion, was welcoming and spacious, and so Achille Guillard would often come to spend summer there with his family. A large garden surrounded the property and the children could play there as they wished. They would often see their father and grandfather bent over illegible scrawl or talking about mysterious symposiums they didn’t understand, but they grasped a few curious words here and there that they would repeat with a pensive air. One was difficult to pronounce and sounded funny. It was a word that would keep on coming up in conversations: “Statistic.” The two little boys made a game of it. It was a little wheel that made a clicking noise when it rolled. The other word was softer, easier, prettier: “Demography.” The grandfather had invented it. > 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