Kathleen at the Survival Strategies exhibition @LMU
photo by @thedevinfeil
Inquiries into A.I. Faculty and Its Development
For over two decades, I have been learning and teaching the history of photography. We discuss the Bertillon system, a method police used in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for identifying suspects or criminals. Alphonse Bertillon came up with the mug shot, as well as a specific technique to measure parts of the body, known as the Bertillon Card. I found such a card in August, 2024, at an antique store in Sherman Oaks, California. I felt immediately excited and, at the same time, realized how strange it was to feel this way. It is because I have never seen a Bertillon Card in person, only in books or online. I bought it, brought it home, and have been looking at it daily. The man on the card is Pablo Arretego, from Tulare, Mexico. He and I are the same height and close to the same weight. His occupation was baker, and he was arrested for burglary, and sentenced to one year in Folsom Prison. I have always felt the Bertillon system was dehumanizing and was later adopted by Sir Francis Galton, the founder of Eugenics.
Alphonse Bertillon and The Bertillon System, and Sir Francis Galton and Eugenics
Installation photograph looking down at the standing display case.
Printed reproductions on paper unless otherwise noted
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Alphonse Bertillon and The Bertillon System
French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914) was the first head of the Forensic Identification Service of the Prefecture de Police in Paris. He developed the first modern system of criminal identification in the 1880s known as the Bertillon System. This system comprised two steps: (a) capturing information from known offenders onto anthropometric data sheets—also known as Bertillon cards—and (b) creating a system for retrieving these data sheets based on partial matches from eyewitness accounts and crime scene evidence.
You can see a reproduction of an anthropometric data sheet, aka the Bertillon card, of the founder of the Bertillon card, Francis Bertillon (1893) above.
Printed reproductions on paper unless otherwise noted
Courtesy of the artist
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Bertillon’s cards included multiple elements: standard photographic mug shots; a collection of physical measurements (i.e. length of forearm), and categorization of features (i.e. four types of nose shapes); precise written description of the suspect’s unique physical characteristics (i.e. scars, birthmarks, etc.). You can see two examples of Bertillon taking measurements of a subject.
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This is an original Bertillon card of Pablo Arretego, a baker from Tulare, Mexico, who was arrested in San Francisco for burglary and sentenced to one year in Folsom Prison.
This card is from the collection of the artist.
Printed reproductions on paper unless otherwise noted
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Police stations in Paris would hang this chart showing rows of eyes, ears, noses and other body parts which were associated with Bertillon’s series of classifications. It was believed that this data would help officers identify potential suspects and categorize mug shots. The title translates in English: Synoptic table of physiognomic features: used for the study of the "spoken portrait.”
Reproduction of “Tableau synoptic des traits physionomiques: pour servir a l'étude du "portrait parlé" by Alphonse Bertillon, ca. 1909
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Bertillon’s system was meant to not only aid Parisian police to identify repeat offenders, but also organize thousands of criminal records. Eventually the Bertillon system was replaced by more modern systems, such as fingerprinting and DNA, but the mug shot format endures to this day.
Class on the Bertillon system in France in 1911.
Bain News Service, Public Domain
Alphonse Bertillon and The Bertillon System, and Sir Francis Galton and Eugenics
Installation photograph looking down at the standing display case.
Printed reproductions on paper unless otherwise noted
1
Sir Francis Galton and Eugenics
Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911) was a 19th-century British polymath and founder of the Eugenics movement. Eugenics is a discredited scientific theory that claimed selective breeding would improve the human race by breeding out undesirable traits such as mental illness, poverty, and criminal tendencies. The term was coined and first published in his 1883 book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development.
Galton used his method of composite photography to make his points about eugenics; that is, he singled out genetic traits that he believed represented lesser individuals, like criminals. He layered multiple exposures from glass-mounted photographic negatives of portraits to make composite images comprised of multiple superimposed faces. You can see examples in this case.
I … have found, as a matter of fact, … (a) process of which … enables us to obtain with mechanical precision a generalized picture; one that represents no man in particular, but portrays an imaginary figure possessing the average features of any given group of men. These ideal faces have a surprising air of reality. Nobody who glanced at one of them for the first time, would doubt its being the likeness of a living person, yet, as I have said, it is no such thing; it is the portrait of a type and not of an individual.
Sir Francis Galton, founder of Eugenics (1878)
(left)
Sir Francis Galton (ca. 1890s) by Eveleen Myers (nee Tennant), reprinted in 2024 by the artist
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On display are several examples of the composite images that Galton published in 19th-century scientific journals to reinforce the idea that photography could capture human traits that could be linked to lesser or sub-human categories. Each of the larger mug shots (above) is a composite image made up of multiple individuals who are pictured in the smaller mug shots. Images like these were considered to have the appearance of a criminal type that would have been circulated to deal with and suppress crime. Galton’s inquiries and publications set the wheels in motion for our contemporary notions of criminal profiling, including using Artificial Intelligence A.I.
(pictured right)
Images reprinted by the artist from Sir Francis Galton, Composite Portraits in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (1878).
On display are several examples of the composite images that Galton published in 19th-century scientific journals to reinforce the idea that photography could capture human traits that could be linked to lesser or sub-human categories. Each of the larger mug shots (above) is a composite image made up of multiple individuals who are pictured in the smaller mug shots. Images like these were considered to have the appearance of a criminal type that would have been circulated to deal with and suppress crime. Galton’s inquiries and publications set the wheels in motion for our contemporary notions of criminal profiling, including using Artificial Intelligence A.I.
Images reprinted by the artist from Sir Francis Galton, Composite Portraits in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (1878).
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Modern Eugenics for Men and Women (1931)
by Melendy, Mary R. & M. Frank Henry
This book is a typical example of a number of books from the 1920s and 1930s that speak contemporaneously to the general public about the virtues of Eugenics.
(Right Page)
CHAPTER XXII
REGULATING NUMBER OF OFFSPRING
MY OBJECT in this work is not to advocate the limitation of offspring, but to the over-burdened mother with a husband who has not yet learned the laws of self-control, and also to the weakly wife whose children must of necessity be weak, I offer a word of counsel.
To some women pregnancy is a nine-months’ torture, and there are others to whom it is almost certain to prove fatal. Previous child-bearing may have proved that the mother cannot again undergo the experience without great suffering. In such cases an increase of family is not to be desired.
There are also many people eminent in scientific research who trace the origin of much human misery and crime to this thoughtless indiscriminate bringing of children into the world. Lord Derby in 1879 reasoned: “Surely it is better to have thirty millions of human beings leading useful and intelligent lives rather than forty millions of human beings struggling painfully for a bare subsistence.” The remedy lies in preventing that condition.
Inquiries into A.I. Faculty and Its Development, 2024
Digital print created with A. I. technology Midjourney
mounted on PVC
“Midjourney” and similar generative artificial intelligence programs use millions of images and text from the internet to train their models. All you need to create a piece of art is to enter words at the prompt: / imagine.
For this work, I used two prompts: imagine / “photograph of a thug in Los Angeles,” as well as imagine / “photograph of a decent man in Los Angeles.” I continued these prompts for several cities in the U.S.
When you make a prompt, “Midjourney” gives you four results. You can choose one, or all of them to increase size (U), or you can choose to begin a new prompt. I made this print to demonstrate the results of my prompts, and share the step-by-step process that a person goes through to make an A.I. creation. What you see here are these three stages: the prompts, the initial thumbnails, and the full resolution image.
These visual A.I. systems create an illusion of reality based on a technique that attempts to find the statistically “best answer” to a prompt. Much has been written about the intrinsic “bias” of these models since their statistical model necessarily draws from what we have put into a vast repository of online images.
What has not been widely observed is that the application of A.I. technology to conjure depictions of criminals echoes the early days of photography as applied to the fields of criminology and anthropology. This project is an exploration of past and present uses of technology to support oppressive systems.
Midjourney prompts:
“photograph of a thug in Los Angeles,” and
“photograph of a decent man in Los Angeles”
Midjourney prompts:
“photograph of a thug in Dallas,” and
“photograph of a decent man in Dallas”
Midjourney prompts:
“photograph of a thug in New York City,” and
“photograph of a decent man in New York City.”
Midjourney prompts:
“photograph of a thug in Miami,” and
“photograph of a decent man in Miami”
Midjourney prompts:
“photograph of a thug in Richmond,” and
“photograph of a decent man in Richmond”
Midjourney prompts:
“photograph of a thug in Chicago,” and
“photograph of a decent man in Chicago”
Installation view of Display Table
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photo credit: @thedevinfeil
Photography student Eric views the Display Table
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photo credit: @thedevinfeil
Opening Reception, September 26, 2024
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#lmucfa
#lmustudioarts
photo credit: @thedevinfeil
Opening Reception, September 26, 2024
#labandartgallery
#lmucfa
#lmustudioarts
photo credit: @thedevinfeil