"Painting has completely changed since the invention of photography.
We don't paint for the same reasons as before."
Francis Bacon
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He certainly would not have remained indifferent to these pictures on the website. Even if he admitted that "He was only interested in photography as a document" and "if some photographers were artists, he didn't take that aspect into account." (1)
These pictures, which were documents to start with, have considerable power of attraction. And yet they are only portraits of assassins, thieves, dropouts that society had condemned. Most of them were taken at the end of the twenties; they were supposed to illustrate news items, which were printed by a certain kind of press that was already veering towards sensationalism.
These pictures were mounted, pasted, retouched and the centring was done by cutting into the photo : the only reason for all this work was to denounce these assassins, thieves and other dropouts to a public as wide as possible.
They are shown here in full of in black monochrome or bistre. They have great presence. They are miles away from what they were first intended for.
Now they are works of art.
It is even tempting to compare them to contemporary artistic tendencies : to Monory (news items), to Boltanski (identities), here, these pictures seem to resist any other plastic art invention. They are perfectly finished entities, they are works of art.
This magnificent retouching is attributed to two Italians. The original work was purely technical, what needed to be done was, by making corrections to the gouache, to give the zinc a matrix which, thanks to is planned distortion, would deliver, after the printing, the hoped for the picture. The assassin, the thief or the dropout then looked the part. These documents were usually made in a hurry and the document was handed over to newspaper for a daily pittance. The result is crudely cropped, retouched, characterless photo which gives a superficial, first degree, slapdash photographic caricature. the printed picture was just like a story made up from banal identity of family photos and it brought out events in all their stark reality. Like the picture of the 14/18 deserter who pretended to be a woman and who was shown up twenty years later, after being murdered by his mistress, by the use of a photo in which he could be seen, dressed as a woman, ying on a chaise longue in his garden.
While these photos are compared to police photography, they have however nothing to do with the project of Alphonse Bertillon, the head of the police headquarters identification department, who was the first to attempt to improve the scientific identification system by ridding police photography of any artistic traces.
(1) in Francis Bacon, "Entretiens avec Michel Archimbaud, Jean-Claude Lattès, Paris 1992 et Folio essais (n° 289) Paris, 1996
Jean-Luc Pons in "Juges et assassins", 1998
Translation Jeanne Cordier
