Vie d’Alphonse Bertillon #05

From the Getty Museum record

> Alphonse was happy that his mother was so young and beautiful. He admired her delicate elegance, the ambiance that her presence alone would create. By her side, life took on a marvelous aspect. She was the being he cherished the most in the world. He vowed a passionate, exclusive tenderness to her. He who suffered being generally misunderstood and unappreciated had the impression that she could guess all his thoughts, both his sorrows and his joys, and share them. Zoé liked going out with this big boy who was so unpleasant with everyone else and so tender and kind with her. They often went on walks at the Tuilleries gardens where all of Paris would meet. Zoé would ask Alphonse to take her arm, but he stubbornly refused. With his mother, he didn’t want to become a “young man,” but stay a “little boy.” > 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