Bertillon

[Nayra Waddles]

Bertillonbegan his career as a records clerk in the Parisian police department. His obsessive love of order led him to reject the unsystematic methods used to identify suspects and motivated him to develop his own method, which combined systematic measurement and photography. In 1883, the Parisian police adopted his anthropometric system, called signaletics or bertillonage. Bertillon identified individuals by measurements of the head and body, shape formations of the ear, eyebrow, mouth, eye, etc., individual markings such as tattoos and scars, and personality characteristics. The measurements were made into a formula that referred to a single unique individual, and recorded onto cards which also bore a photographic frontal and profile portrait of the suspect (the "mug shot"). The cards were then systematically filed and cross-indexed, so they could be easily retrieved. In 1884, Bertillon used his method to identify 241 multiple offenders, and after this demonstration, bertillonage was adopted by police forces in Great Britain, Europe, and the Americas.

But bertillonage was difficult to implement. The measuring tools needed frequent recalibration and maintenance; the process was labor intensive, requiring rigorously trained, highly motivated and competent technicians, and was expensive. When individuals were measured several times, even well-trained officers made their measurements in different ways and sometimes failed to obtain the exact same numbers. Measurements could also change as the criminal aged. Eventually, police departments began to abandon bertillonage in favor of fingerprint identification, although some elements, such as the inventorying of basic information and features, scars, tattoos, and the mug shot, were retained.

One of Bertillon's most important contributions to forensics was the systematic use of photography to document crime scenes and evidence. He devised a method of photographing crime scenes with a camera mounted on a high tripod, to document and survey the scene before it was disturbed by investigators. He also developed "metric photography," which used measured grids to document the dimensions of a particular space and the objects in it.

Alphonse Bertillon's Tableau synoptic des traits physionomiques was essentially a cheat sheet to help police clerks put into practice his pioneering method for classifying and archiving the images (and accompanying details) of repeat offenders, a system known as bertillonage. Beginning his career as a records clerk in the Parisian police department, Bertillon, the child of two statisticians and endowed with an obsessive love of order, soon became exasperated with the chaos of the files on offenders. The problem was particularly acute when it came to identifying offenders as repeat offenders (recidivists), given that the person in question could simply provide a false name. Before Bertillon, to find the files of the accused (or if there was even one already existing) the police would have to sift through the notorious "rogues' gallery", a disorganised mess of photographic portraits of past offenders, and hope for a visual match.

The at once wonderful and somewhat terrifying image featured here, though rendered obsolete in a practical sense, stands today as a potent symbol for the new age of surveillance and "biopower" which it helped to usher in. As the Met Museum, where this copy of Bertillon's image is housed, comments, "although intended merely as a filing aide, this image of the human face in all its striations of repetition and difference renders surveillance as a terrifying manifestation of the modern sublime."

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Alphonse Bertillon was a French criminologist and anthropologist who created the first system of physical measurements, photography, and record-keeping that police could use to identify recidivist criminals. Before Bertillon, suspects could only be identified through eyewitness accounts and unorganized files of photographs.

Bertillon began his career as a records clerk in the Parisian police department. His obsessive love of order led him to reject the unsystematic methods used to identify suspects and motivated him to develop his own method, which combined systematic measurement and photography.

In 1883, the Parisian police adopted his anthropometric system, called signaletics or bertillonage. Bertillon identified individuals by measurements of the head and body, shape formations of the ear, eyebrow, mouth, eye, etc., individual markings such as tattoos and scars, and personality characteristics.

The measurements were made into a formula that referred to a single unique individual, and recorded onto cards which also bore a photographic frontal and profile portrait of the suspect (the "mug shot"). The cards were then systematically filed and cross-indexed, so they could be easily retrieved. In 1884, Bertillon used his method to identify 241 multiple offenders, and after this demonstration, bertillonage was adopted by police forces in Great Britain, Europe, and the Americas.

Alphonse Bertillon (1853-1914) was a French photographer and forensic scientist who is best known for developing the system of anthropometry, a method of identifying individuals based on their physical measurements. Bertillon's system, which he called bertillonage, was widely used in law enforcement until the advent of fingerprinting. In addition to his work in anthropometry, Bertillon was also a pioneer in the field of documentary photography. He used photography as a tool for criminal investigation, taking detailed photographs of crime scenes and evidence. Bertillon's photographs were often used in court cases and were praised for their accuracy and attention to detail. His work in both forensic science and photography had a significant impact on the fields of criminology and criminal justice. Other notable figures in the field of forensic science and photography during Bertillon's time include Francis Galton and Auguste Rodin.

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