Foussard. Eugène. 26 ans, né le 7/12/67 à Dangeul (Sarthe). Peintre en bâtiment. Anarchiste. 2/7/94. 1894

Curator: This is a daguerreotype by Alphonse Bertillon, titled "Foussard. Eugène. 26 ans, né le 7/12/67 à Dangeul (Sarthe). Peintre en bâtiment. Anarchiste. 2/7/94," made in 1894. Editor: The first thing that strikes me is the gaze, so direct. Almost unsettlingly present despite being over a century old. Curator: Indeed. Bertillon, as a police official, pioneered this style of photographic documentation for criminal identification. This image is, in essence, a mugshot. Editor: Which frames it very differently. I’d assumed a portrait of someone wanting to record their likeness. Now I'm thinking about the labor of building and anarchism at the turn of the century. Eugène—the name rolls off the tongue—is no passive subject. You can see it in the set of his jaw, the lines etched into his face, a life carved from toil. I wonder about the paint he applied. Was it meticulously crafted, or functional, meant to last for generations? Curator: We know he was an anarchist, which places his labour within a network of mutual aid and resistance to centralised systems. The materiality of building, like the materials of Bertillon's own system of documentation, became tools, potential weapons. Editor: Look at the textures in this image itself. The slight blurriness softens him and yet it gives him a certain aura too. Think of all the hands that made that daguerreotype plate and mixed those chemicals. This object isn't just evidence. It’s heavy with intent, fear, and perhaps, defiance. Curator: A photographic object born out of—and feeding back into—a system of social control. Photography's relationship to realism here reveals more about its constructedness. It shows an industrial world in motion with a portrait imbued with all the human tensions contained. Editor: A powerful thing, isn’t it? To look at a single, simple photograph, and see within it an entire world teetering on change. Curator: It speaks of the powerful potential residing even in what seems like a single frame.