Vie d’Alphonse Bertillon #13

From the Getty Museum record

> Alphonse felt the same way about his work as a scribe as he did about copying Boileau’s verses, only the punishment was worse because it was his daily chore. He found a powerful derivative in the anthropological society, his natural milieu. He compared himself to a fish that an unfortunate circumstance had thrown into a bowl of rice powder and who suddenly found himself swimming in clear water. During the sessions of this society, he met eminent scientists with whom he could exchange ideas. Here at least, he was not the obscure office clerk, he was the son of the Doctor Bertillon and the grandson of Achille Guillard, which meant that he could participate in this intellectual, highly appreciated and admired formation. He was an assiduous follower of the classes of craniology and ethnology at the School of Anthropology, as well as classes in demography taught by his father. > 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