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Alphonse Bertillon

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Bertillon, Alphonse 

Born Apr. 22,1853, inParis; died there on Feb. 3, 1914. French criminologist who devised several police methods for solving criminal cases.

Bertillon was the head of the bureau of forensic identification of the Paris prefecture. The system of methods devised by Bertillon for forensic identification (establishing identity) is called Bertillonage in bourgeois criminology. The system included anthropometry, a verbal portrait, descriptive photography (a technical means of portrait photography in which a person’s distinctive features are highlighted very clearly), and a description of a person’s distinctive marks. Beginning in 1890 and until the early 20th century, Bertillonage was used by the police of all countries, but later it was gradually replaced by a new system of criminal registration, fingerprinting. Bertillon appeared in the legal proceedings of the Dreyfus affair as a legal handwriting expert and gave false testimony that ascribed the authorship of a document—the bordereau—to Dreyfus.



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In the 1880s, when a French crime fighter named Alphonse Bertillon pioneered the mug shot as a unique form of portraiture, the photographs he took were expected to do one thing: Help establish an individual's identity at a time when driver's licenses, fingerprint files, and Facebook pages didn't exist.
PM Roget did the research in Britain for his 19th-century thesaurical classification of language, with rigid value judgments on vice and virtue in every word group; Alphonse Bertillon of Paris gave the world the mugshot as a defence against crime, but alas encouraged Cesare Lombroso to invent a physical taxonomy of evil.
The best thing in "I & A" is a cabinet of photographs of arrestees at a Paris police station, made by Alphonse Bertillon in 1890, which proves conclusively that nonart made at the behest of bad science (in this case, the visual study of "criminal types") is much more powerful as ironic post-Modern art than .
 
 
 
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