Recomposed Faces

Well before computers, some 19th-century policemen already attempted to reconstruct criminal faces from fragmentary descriptions. Witnesses, draftsmen and investigators combined noses, eyes or jaws in specialized catalogs to produce "scientific" portraits. The human face then became an almost mechanical assembly problem.

At the end of the 19th century, European police forces sought to rationalize criminal identification.

French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon developed several systems based on body measurements, standardized photographs and extremely detailed facial descriptions. In some services, investigators used catalogs of eyes, noses, ears or jaw shapes to progressively recompose the portrait of a suspect described by witnesses. This approach seemed very modern for the time.

The human face began to be thought of as a combination of characteristics analyzable separately. The portraits obtained often remained approximate, but they marked an important evolution: police investigation became increasingly visual and systematic.

This logic directly influenced future police sketches of the 20th century then contemporary facial recognition technologies. It also reveals a broader scientific obsession of the era: classifying individuals according to supposedly objective physical criteria. The modern criminal progressively ceased to be only sought; he became archived, measured and visually reconstructed through quasi-industrial identification systems.