345
offenders. The practice was highly localized, thereby
limiting the usefulness of the photograph as a regular
investigative tool or legal document. Often made by
professional portrait galleries, the arbitrary approach
to these photographs diminished their scientifi c value,
and those made as daguerreotypes or ambrotypes had
an additional physical fragility and uniqueness that
prevented widespread circulation.
Photography’s role in two high-profi le investigations
of the 1860s and 1870s helped establish its place as a
practical tool in police work. The fi rst was the hunt for
suspects in the aftermath of U.S. president Abraham
Lincoln’s assassination in 1865. Government-issued
wanted posters included albumen carte-de-visite format
photographs of the principal suspects, while the Secret
Service called upon Alexander Gardner to photograph
the crime scene, the convicted conspirators and their
subsequent execution. The other instance was the
round-up of suspected insurgents after the fall of the
Paris Commune in 1871, when government offi cials
relied on photographs of Commune crowds as evidence
linking individuals to the events. Offi cials compiled
albums of suspected Communards and hired photog-
rapher Eugene Appert to photograph suspects as they
were apprehended.
In 1870 the British government required all prisoners
to be photographed, with additional prints sent to Scot-
land Yard for a national archive, but after the Commune,
Paris became the leader in forensic photography for
much of the rest of the century. Its Prefecture of Police
established a photographic service in 1874 and criminal
identifi cation photography came into regular use. Two
competing methods for documenting criminals arose in
Europe at this time, one devised in England by the stat-
istician Francis Galton, the other developed in France by
Alphonse Bertillon, a physical anthropologist. Galton’s
system was meant to be a preventive measure, further-
ing the argument of the biological causes of crime by
producing photographic composites of known criminals
to aid authorities in building criminal stereotypes. Italian
psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso applied Galton’s method
to his own research in eugenics, and used photographic
composites in Criminal Man (1876) to argue the genetic
inferiority of criminals.
Conversely, Bertillon’s system—fi rst suggested by
Ernest Lacan in 1854—sought to solve specifi c crimes
rather than the roots of criminality. It involved docu-
menting suspects by coupling standardized full-face
and profi le bust photographs (eventually called a “mug
shot”) with a set of precise anthropometric measure-
ments. Appointed Chief of Judicial Identity in 1879,
Bertillon created a huge photographic and statistical
archive for the Paris police, and by 1893 he claimed that
it had helped identify over 4,500 recidivists. Bertillon
also compiled tables of sectional photographs of facial
features to aid police in piecing together a suspect’s ap-
pearance from witness testimony. His methods, known
as “bertillonage,” quickly spread as far as Russia and the
U.S., aided by his numerous books on the subject.
Despite occasional examples reaching as far back as
the 1860s, crime scene photography only became stan-
dard practice in the closing years of the 19th century,
as police departments hired staff photographers and the
invention of fl ash photography made on-the-spot fi eld
work practical. Metric photography became fundamen-
tal to such activities, employing wide-angle lenses and
large plates to capture fi ne details while photographing
at precise angles (often directly overhead) with measur-
ing scales that permitted accurate computation of dis-
tances. Similarly, stereometric photography documented
individual articles of evidence with carefully measured
front and side views. In these fi elds as well, Bertillon
took the lead, promoting them through displays at the
1889 Universal Exposition in Paris and the 1893 World
Columbian Exposition in Chicago. By the early 20th
century, such photography would commonly appear as
evidence in courthouses around the world.
Stephen Monteiro
See Also: Pornography; Daguerreotypes; Talbot,
William Henry Fox; Brady, Matthew; Galton, Sir
Francis; Bertillon, Alphonse; and Lacan, Ernest.Further Reading
Cole, Simon A., Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting
and Criminal Identification, Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University, 2001.
Hamilton, Peter and Roger Hargreaves, The Beautiful and the
Damned: The Creation of Identity in Nineteenth Century
Photography, London: National Portrait Gallery, 2001 (ex-
hibition catalogue).
Parry, Eugenia, Crime Album Stories, Paris 1886–1902, Zurich:
Scalo, 2000.
Phillips, Sandra S. (ed.), Police Pictures: The Photograph as
Evidence, San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, 1997.
Rhodes, Henry T.F., Alphonse Bertillon: Father of Scientifi c
Detection, London: George G. Harrap, 1956.
Sekula, Allan, “The Body and the Archive” in The Contest of
Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, edited by Rich-
ard Bolton, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT, 1989.
Stern, Madeleine B., “Matthew Brady and the Rationale of Crime:
A Discovery in Daguerreotypes,” in Quarterly Journal of the
Library of Congress, 31:3, 1974, 127–35.
Tagg, John, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photogra-
phies and Histories, Amherst, Massachusetts: University of
Massachusetts, 1988.CRITICISM
Most photography criticism in the nineteenth century at-
tempted to identify photography’s applications and areas
of expertise; a smaller group of texts also included de-