Vie d’Alphonse Bertillon #16

From the Getty Museum record

> “Dupont” looked at the print and went pale, he stuttered: “It’s...it’s not me, I don’t have a nose like that.” “Not you!” exclaimed Alphonse. “But look closely..., Mister Inspector, can there be the slightest doubt?” “Ah, Monsieur Bertillon, there is no way of being mistaken. His name may be ‘Martin’ or ‘Dupont’, but it is exactly the prisoner we see before us,” said the policeman. “Look here,” said Alphonse, “even the little wart next to his left eyebrow is reproduced in the photograph. So? Dupont?” “Very well, Monsieur...it’s me...what rotten luck...and even if I tell you that my name is neither Martin nor Dupont, just in case you haven’t already guessed that too.” The chief of police, immediately informed, came to take note of the identification himself and warmly congratulated Alphonse. […] Alphonse went to Neuilly as fast as possible. The Doctor Bertillon felt so happy that he forgot his terrible suffering for a moment. Jacques went into an enthusiastic round of applause. […] There was a little party that evening in the calm abode of the rue Charles Laffitte. > > 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