Vie d’Alphonse Bertillon #22

From the Getty Museum record

> Jacques lived on the 26th Avenue Marceau. We were the close neighbours of Alphonse and Maly, and so we’d go and spend time with him every day. […] Jacques and Georges were with him on his last nights and days. Then one evening around eleven o’clock, Jacques came back to the Avenue Marceau, he found us all awake, his heart tightened with anguish, with a foreboding sense of the inexorable. Suddenly aged ten years more, in a voice broken by emotion, he announced the terrible misfortune. As I write these lines I can still hear the words ringing like a toll: “He is dead!” Jacques shivered when he pronounced them, and they found such a painful echo in our souls. It was on the 13th February, 1914. Alphonse Bertillon was not yet sixty-one. His obsequies were national. They took place on the 16th February, 1914, and many people came. > > 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