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June 8, 2012
An exhibition at the archive, Fichés?, trace how attempts to identify individuals evolved with technology of photography.
Daniel Nethery in France’s first facebooks at Inside Story says that:
It was the repression of the Paris Commune in 1871 that gave impetus to the rise of the mug shot. Police sent photographers into the prisons to photograph those arrested, and then they composed the first criminal record cards to include a photographic portrait ... By the end of the Great War it had become commonplace for French people to have their photograph taken for administrative purposes. The portraits were required for a whole range of new identity documents
The darker side of the growing use of photographic portraits emerged when French police began to build collections of individual record cards, not all parts of the population were catalogued with the same fervour in that Roma and other nomadic peoples were targeted.
The habit of attaching photographic portraits to anything remains in France, where it is still common for job applicants to send off their curriculum vitae with a photo attached.
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