Vie d’Alphonse Bertillon #03

From the Getty Museum record

> The regular milieu of the Guillards and the Bertillons were scientists and doctors who made frequent visits [to the number 14] Rue de Bruxelles. Phrenology was in fashion at the time. Its echoes reached the Bertillons’ household. One of their closest friends, the Doctor Letourneau, was mad about it. He asked the Doctor Bertillon the permission to attentively examine the skulls of his young children in order to determine their characters and aptitudes from the places of their bumps. The Doctor Bertillon was most willing to participate in this experience, although he didn’t believe in the results. After having extensively palpated and explored the two heads of the little boys, the Doctor Letourneau declared that they had methodical, precise minds. “As for Alphonse,” he added, “besides the bump for classification, he possesses a sense of the series. He will be an orderly, meticulous boy.” > > 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