Véret. 0ctave-Jean. 19 ans, né à Paris XXe. Photographe. Anarchiste. 2/3/94. 1894

This is Alphonse Bertillon’s photograph of Octave-Jean Véret, a 19-year-old anarchist, taken in Paris in 1894. The photograph employs Bertillon’s innovative identification system—anthropometry—a method he believed could categorize and control individuals through precise physical measurements. Consider the act of documentation itself: the unflinching gaze, the stark presentation. It echoes the long history of portraiture, from royal likenesses meant to project power to the mugshots intended to strip it away. The very act of capturing a face has long carried a peculiar tension between memorialization and control. Think of the Roman practice of death masks, preserving the visages of ancestors. Or consider the tradition of the effigy, intended to embody the deceased but also to exert a symbolic presence. Here, Véret's photograph becomes a modern-day effigy, a tool for societal order, yet also a stark reminder of the individual caught in the web of institutional power. The photograph, then, is an artifact deeply embedded in the cultural memory, a palimpsest of power, identity, and control.