Cros. Jean. 19 ans, né à Négrin (Tarn). Tailleur d'habits. Pas de motif. 8/3/94. 1894

This is an albumen print made in France on March 8th, 1894, by Alphonse Bertillon. It depicts a man named Jean Cros. But this isn't a portrait in the traditional sense. It’s a mugshot. Bertillon was a French police officer and biometrics researcher who pioneered the use of photography for criminal identification. His "portrait parlé," or spoken portrait, involved taking precise body measurements and facial feature descriptions to create a standardized system of identification. This was at a time when policing methods were being reformed by scientific strategies of observation and documentation. Consider the social implications of this image. The subject is stripped of individuality, reduced to a set of data points, and archived into a system designed to control and survey the population. The photograph is also inscribed with handwritten notations, further dehumanizing the subject. These kinds of images were and are powerful tools of state control, raising questions about surveillance, privacy, and the power dynamics inherent in the act of representation. Historical records and sociological studies of the time help contextualize the anxieties about crime and social order that fueled these developments.