Vie d’Alphonse Bertillon #01

From the Getty Museum record

> On the 24th April, 1853, at the number 22 of the prolonged Rue de Rivoli, the Bertillon genealogy was enriched with a new specimen. He was scrawny newborn. His father, the Doctor Louis-Adolphe Bertillon, contemplated him with pride, but also with worry. The child cried and did not seem happy to be alive. The doctor went out of the room. He was going to declare the birth of his son at the closest Public Records Office. He was just about to seize his hat, his hand stretched out, when all of a sudden he stopped his gesture... “By the way,” he thought, “what will he be called?” > > 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