Vie d’Alphonse Bertillon #21

From the Getty Museum record

> Not long before the disease that was to carry him away took on an acute form, he felt the need one winter’s day to take a walk in the Père Lachaise cemetery in company with his brothers and Maly. The cemetery reposed under a thick layer of snow. The four strollers were struck by the majestic silence that ruled over the area. An immense sadness could be felt. Tombs, nothing but tombs, rich tombs, modest tombs, commemorative monuments: everywhere the image of death and the doleful cortege of regrets and grief it carries along. The three brothers walked down the alleys, in prey of their own meditations. They didn’t speak; they were contemplative and inspired by the surrounding serenity. Alphonse murmured very softly, as if in a dream: “This is where I’d like to be buried.” He looked towards Maly and was surprised to see her shed a few tears. > 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