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1. Gruesome crime scene photos unveiled at cannibal trial archive#
2. Gruesome crime scene photos unveiled at cannibal trial series#

In 1888, he had been appointed head of the newly created Department of Judicial Identity in the Paris police prefecture.

Gruesome crime scene photos unveiled at cannibal trial series#

He also developed a system called metric photography, using a series of measured grids to standardize the scale between photos and quantify both the dimensions of objects and the distances between them.īy the time Bertillon began photographing crime scenes, his reputation was well-established.

So to distinguish the mug shot from its better known cousin, the half-length portrait-and create documentary evidence that would hold up better in court-he deployed his secret weapon: detailed standardization of everything from how a suspect is lighted to how he or she is posed. But he didn’t see photos as entirely objective, since gazing at a portrait, for example, came with a number of cultural precepts about how and why to look. Believing that the medium was more objective than the human eye, he saw it as a powerful tool in his quest to apply scientific methods to collecting evidence and identifying lawbreakers. In addition to revolutionizing police work, Bertillon’s approach to photography had a profound effect on how photos were understood and used. The system was quickly adopted by the Paris police department, throughout Europe and, before the close of the 19th century, in New York and Chicago too.

Gruesome crime scene photos unveiled at cannibal trial archive#

(Bertillon believed ear size and shape could especially aid in identification.) All that information would be placed onto a single card that could be filed into an orderly, cross-referenced archive that could help police more easily run a check and identify a repeat offender.

And finally, the system called for two photographs of the criminal-one frontal and the other in profile. Then came a physical description that he called a “speaking portrait,” that included unique identifiers ranging from tattoos, moles and scars to hair-growth pattern and shoulder inclination. įirst, he outlined measurements to map a criminal’s body-things like head width, arm span, sitting height and finger length. One reason: He believed that ear size and shape were strong identifiers. Less than a year after starting his job, the French police clerk proposed addressing the problem with a three-part system that came to be known as Bertillonage.Ĭlerk-turned-criminologist Alphonse Bertillon pioneered the practice of mug shots taken from the front and the side. Attempts to systematize criminal records before Bertillon-including detective Allan Pinkerton’s “Rogues’ Gallery”-hadn’t been efficient or effective. He soon turned his attention to the problem of recidivism, a chronic problem in Paris since the record-keeping of convicts’ names and photos was haphazard at best repeat offenders couldn’t often be identified as such, and thus weren’t given commensurate punishments. His work documenting, measuring and categorizing victims and criminals alike revolutionized how photography was used both by the police-and, subsequently, in courts of law.īy all accounts, Bertillon was an exacting and obsessive man who, after an unsuccessful stint in the army, joined the Paris police department in 1879 at the urging of his medical-professor father. While working for the Paris police prefecture, he not only pioneered the crime-scene photograph and its counterpart, the mugshot, but he used his lowly filing job to create the first cross-referenced, retrievable index-card system of criminal data. It was originally made under the direction of Alphonse Bertillon, a Parisian-records-clerk-turned-pioneering-criminologist who is now largely regarded as the father of forensic photography. These images now reside in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, part of an extraordinary historical document: a nearly 100-page album of unflinching crime photos from the dawn of the 20th century.

Her darkening hands and feet are a clue that some time had passed since the killing. Madame Debeinche, dead on the floor of her bedroom in Paris.