1143
1870s) took individual photographs of those incarcer-
ated in Versailles for the police, prefi guring the format
and practices adopted by the studio established in the
Paris Police Department in 1872—the fi rst offi cial pho-
tographic service to be set up in a police station.
In 1888 Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914), who had
begun his career as a record clerk in the Paris Police
Department, became Director of its Identification
Bureau due to his invention of anthropometry—the
fi rst scientifi c system of criminal identifi cation. The
system, named bertillonage in his honor, consisted of
recording eleven measurements of set parts of the head
and body on a card which, accompanied by two photo-
graphs and additional physical details such as eye and
hair color, established a unique, classifi able and, most
importantly, retrievable criminal record. Replacing
the unreliable system of eyewitness accounts, in 1882
bertillonage had led to a marked increase in the number
of arrests of multiple offenders and was subsequently
adopted by police departments outside of France, such
as New York City (1888), Argentina (1891) and Chicago
(1894). Since bertillonage used photographs in the
process of identifi cation, in 1888 Bertillon annexed the
préfecture’s photography studio to his own department
and introduced a strictly uniform photographic tech-
nique to complement the system’s precision. Bertillon
stipulated the standardization of lighting conditions,
exposure time, distance from the subject, pose and scale
of reduction, ensuring that a clear full face and profi le
portrait—a mug shot—appeared on each identifi cation
card. He also created the portrait parlé, an identifi ca-
tion chart of sectional photographs of facial features,
such as ears and noses, mounted side by side to enable
comparison and contrast.
Photography also played an important role in the
solving of crimes, by identifying and documenting clues
as well as people. Although not widely accepted as evi-
dence in a court of law until the end of the nineteenth,
forensic photography was used from the late 1850s to
discredit forged documents (Luco et al. v. USA, 1859),
record crime scenes (Lausanne, France, 1867), includ-
ing traffi c accidents (Blair v. Inhabitants of Pelham,
USA, 1875) and provide evidence of injuries (Redden v.
Gates, USA, 1879). Bertillon contributed greatly to this
fi eld by devising metric photography—the inclusion of
a measuring scale in photographs to provide a permanent
record of the scale and relationship between objects at
a crime scene. He also developed contact methods of
photography which he used for reproduction and en-
largement of admitted or questioned documents, most
famously le bordereau in the case of the Dreyfus Affair
for which he submitted evidence for the prosecution in
- Soon after the turn of the century bertillonage was
supplanted by the more reliable system of dactyloscopy
or identifi cation by fi ngerprints. Ironically, this change
of method caused a growth in the number of specialized
police photographers as it increased the need for records
to be made of impressions of fi nger and handprints found
at crime scenes. This practice, of which examples can
be found in the Archives Historiques et Musée de la
Préfecture de Police, Paris, was initiated by Alphonse
Bertillon in the 1880s.
Photographs of criminals were also adopted outside
the judicial system. In the 1860s cartes de visite of
notorious villains were sold to the public, satiating
popular fascination with deviancy and abnormality and
prefi guring the celebrity status accorded to gangsters in
1930s America. In the 1870s police photographs were
subjected to statistical analysis in order to identify a
criminal ‘type.’ These investigations were underpinned
by the pseudo-sciences of physiognomy and phrenol-
ogy, a belief in the correlation between an individual’s
internal character traits and their facial features or
shape of head. Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso
(1835–1909) assembled a collection of photographic
portraits of murderers in the hope of discovering clinical
signs of disposition to criminality. Meanwhile in Britain,
infl uenced by the evolutionary theories of his cousin
Charles Darwin, British biostatistician and eugenicist,
Francis Galton (1822–1911) devised a new system of
physiognomic record to show the features common to
violent criminals, felons and sexual offenders. Galton
created ‘composite portraits’ by re-photographing
pictures of prisoners on the same plate by successive
multiple exposures to create a photographic ‘mean.’
Although the notion of the ‘born criminal,’ who can
be recognized by certain physical traits, such as a low
forehead, ‘jug ears’ and large jaw, is now considered
incorrect, it continues to infl uence representations of
criminals in popular culture.
Anne-Marie Eze
See also: Anthropology; Appert, Eugène; Bertillon,
Alphonse; Brady, Mathew B.; Crime, Forensic, and
Police Photography; Duchenne, Guillaume-Benjamin-
Amant de Boulogne; Ethnography; Lacan, Ernest;
and Zola, Emile.Further Reading
Bertillon, Alphonse, La photographie judiciaire: avec un appen-
dice sur la classifi cation et l’identifi cation anthopométriques,
Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1890.
Bertillon, Alphonse, and Spearman, E.R. The identifi cation of
the criminal classes by the anthropometrical method. An ad-
dress...And Speech by M. L. Herbette [on the same subject]
... Translated from the French by E. R. Spearman, London:
Spottiswoode & Co., 1889.
Frizot, Michel, “Body of Evidence: The Ethnophotography of
Difference.” In A new history of photography, edited by
Michel Frizot, Köln: Könemann, 1998.
Hamilton, Peter, and Hargreaves, Roger, The Beautiful and the
Damned: The Creation of Identity in Nineteenth CenturyP-