Most histories of photography, including social histories, make only passing reference to forensic photography or other police uses of the medium, if any mention at all. Art historian Alan Sekula called for a more expansive social history of photography that included police archives in his now classic 1986 essay, “The Body and the Archive.” Sekula’s article is one of the first English-language examinations of 19th Century French police official Alphonse Bertillon, who is now widely credited with developing the first standardized techniques of both mug-shot and crime-scene photography. Since then, much has been written about Bertillon’s system of anthropometry, for criminal identification, with some attention to his innovations of both the mug shot and a system of mug-shot indexing. Much less has been said about Bertillon’s crime-scene photography. This paper begins to piece together the unexamined history of crime-scene photography, starting with Bertillon’s vertical-perspective photographs of murdered bodies, which have recently resurfaced in a number of museum exhibitions in New York, Paris and London. Bertillon's systems represent an earlier moment in the modernization of the forensic sciences, the technology of photography, and the institution of policing—each entangled with one another. I argue that innovations in police and forensic photography have played a central role in the modernization of both the policing and the forensic sciences, and in the development of the decisively modern medium of photography as such, and that the modernity of police and forensic photography is nowhere more apparent than when displayed in the museum exhibition.
