Vie d’Alphonse Bertillon #12

From the Getty Museum record

> “Without wanting to discourage you from studying a subject that is capable of enriching science and that I take extremely seriously, I deplore that it will not lead you to a lucrative situation. It is good to be disinterested, but in order to be even more so, you must start by being independent.” Alphonse agreed, and asked his father to find him a job, even a modest one. Well-disposed towards this new attitude, Louis-Adolphe made use of his influence to find a place for his son in the administration of the prefecture de police. Alphonse started on the 15th March, 1879. It was a most modest and fastidious situation. He was an auxiliary employee in the first office and had to copy documents all day long. This unattractive task bored him more than anything that could be imagined. > > 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