Vie d’Alphonse Bertillon #08

From the Getty Museum record

> And so Alphonse drew his inspiration from the complicated notion of Chinese politeness. From then on, he was to qualify himself as “a tiny worm addressing the rising sun.” This earned him hundreds of lines to copy and detention on Sundays. Instead of contemplating the sea and its fierce poetry, he was condemned to copy, with his zealous girl’s handwriting (that he was to keep all his life), verses of Boileau! Always Boileau! He took a sudden dislike to this author, but this didn’t stop him from accentuating the marks of deference towards his teachers. From as far as he could see them, he would bow to the ground with an old-fashioned sense of protocol. This placating met up with such success among his classmates that the headmaster finally had to inform the Doctor Bertillon that his son had been dismissed from school at Le Havre because of his . . . “exaggerated politeness.” > 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