Vie d’Alphonse Bertillon #20

From the Getty Museum record

> The third master policeman with whom Alphonse Bertillon was closely tied was the professor Minovici, director of the Bucharest scientific police. Unfortunately, Minovici rarely came to Paris, but he was a regular visitor to congresses on criminal anthropology. In 1905, in Turin, the Professor Lacassagne presented Reiss to Minovici, and they formed a close circle of four friends, all of them eminent policemen who, in spite of their different ages, agreed on just about every subject. They often met during the warm season at La Varenne-Saint-Hilaire, where Alphonse Bertillon had rented a little house on the banks of the Marne. They would all sit around the garden in the shade of the large trees and chat all day. Of course, the conversations were only about crime and new methods of research in indicial proof. > 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