Vie d’Alphonse Bertillon #06

From the Getty Museum record

> Alphonse entered the Lycée Impérial de Versailles on the 5th October, 1866. He wore the dark blue tunic with golden buttons, the boarders’ uniform, which gave him the martial air he was to appreciate to start off with. [. . .] During the first months, attracted by the novelty of the situation, Alphonse worked brilliantly. But alas, as soon as February, his marks in Latin started to show an unfortunate weakness that worried Louis-Adolphe, leading him to predict the worst, in the near future. [. . .] He wanted to show his three sons to be men by their character and scholars by the extent of their knowledge. It was with painful consternation that he read on the bottom of Alphonse’s school report the following observation: “Very bad student from all points of view. His parents should take him out of this school.” Abominable words! The sentence was a fright to his eyes and soul. He left for Versailles straight away where he found Alphonse secretly raising frogs. > 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