Vie d’Alphonse Bertillon #11

From the Getty Museum record

> Life would have been very dull if the colonel hadn’t employed him as a secretary. No more fastidious duties, and lots of leisure time. The charms of Clermont-Ferrand were rapidly exhausted, but there was a renowned university in the city. For want of anything better to do, Alphonse signed up for studying medicine. He started off by studying the skeleton. To his great surprise, he was passionate about it. He felt like he had found the path he had been searching for over so many years, and that he was suddenly on known ground… [...] He was able to verify that his first conclusions were absolutely correct: the 222 pieces composing the human skeleton are as varied in their forms and dimensions as the features in a face. He brilliantly passed his first exam in medicine in 1876 at the school of Clermont-Ferrand. [...] “The tradition has to be continued,” said Alphonse to himself, “and Clermont-Ferrand will be the starting point of a long series of studies for me. I owe this to the memory of the Guillards, and I’ll prove in the future that I too belong to the same intellectual dynasty!” And he went back to study his measurements of bones. He was so fascinated by his discoveries and their possible consequences that he stopped his studies in medicine. > 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