Grégoire. Aimé, Paul. 36 ans, né à Bruxelles (Belgique). Accordeur de piano. Anarchiste. 2/3/94. 1894

This photograph was made in 1894 by Alphonse Bertillon, using a process called albumen printing. This was a popular, accessible medium at the time, but it was also used systematically to record people like Grégoire, whose information is written directly onto the print. The albumen process involved coating paper with egg whites and silver nitrate, making it sensitive to light. When exposed to a negative, it would create a detailed, sepia-toned image. Mass production made photography like this affordable, yet here it is deployed in the service of surveillance. What we see here isn’t an artwork in the traditional sense, but a record of a life, categorized and archived. Bertillon was standardizing a technology of control. Ironically, he was also engaging in a form of image-making with its own kind of aesthetic, and one that now strikes us as both historical and strangely intimate. It reminds us that even the most functional objects carry cultural meaning.