Vie d’Alphonse Bertillon #07

From the Getty Museum record

> The Franco-German war had just started and disasters were fast to follow. Everyone was aghast with pain and humiliation. The notion of the homeland took a hold of Alphonse’s heart. A new, violent, flaming sensation, coming from the depths of his soul made him feel the blows against his country. France became a living being for him, infinitely dear, whose concrete image was confused with that of his mother. He gave it an almost divine signification; he who had no religion, he believed in his homeland. As usual, upon that moment, he didn’t speak to anyone about this internal disruption. He learnt with despair that Paris had been invaded, where Louis-Adolphe and Jacques still were, and about whom he had no more news. He only knew that Jacques, who was studying his first year in medicine, was a medical auxiliary at the Val-de-Grâce. > 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