Women Anarchists of 1894

Alphonse Bertillon
Anarchist Victorine Trucano
1894
albumen silver print
Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Paris police clerk Alphonse Bertillon gave his name to a phenomenon known as Bertillonage. Curators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art explain its nature and purpose –

"The system had three components: anthropometric measurement, precise verbal description of the prisoner's physical characteristics, and standardized photographs of the face. In the early 1890s Paris was subject to a wave of bombings and assassination attempts carried out by anarchist proponents of "propaganda of the deed." One of Bertillon's greatest successes came in March 1892 when his system of criminal identification led to the arrest of an anarchist bomber and career criminal who went by the name Ravachol. The publicity surrounding the case earned Bertillon the Legion of Honor and encouraged police departments around the world to adopt his anthropometric system." 

Hundred of Bertillon's police photos now repose in New York at the Met. One reflection they prompt is that the subjects almost certainly never saw them.

Alphonse Bertililon
Anarchist Annette Soubrier
1894
albumen silver print
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Alphonse Bertillon
Anarchist Péronne Pallaz
1894
albumen silver print
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Alphonse Bertillon
Anarchist Antoinette Cazal
1894
albumen silver print
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Alphonse Bertillon
Anarchist Minna Schrader
1894
albumen silver print
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Alphonse Bertillon
Anarchist Caroline Herman
1894
albumen silver print
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Alphonse Bertillon
Anarchist Marie Zanini
1894
albumen silver print
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Alphonse Bertillon
Anarchist Clotilde Adnet
1894
albumen silver print
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Alphonse Bertillon
Anarchist Marie Bertout
1894
albumen silver
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Alphonse Bertillon
Anarchist Eva Chiroki
1894
albumen silver print
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Alphonse Bertillon
Anarchist Louise Pioget
1894
albumen silver print
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Alphonse Bertillon
Anarchist Jeanne Malpet
1894
albumen silver print
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Alphonse Bertillon
Anarchist Léontine Borreman
1894
albumen silver print
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Alphonse Bertillon
Anarchist Jeanne Marie Adnet
1894
albumen silver print
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Bonfires

Woman suffrage bonfire on sidewalk in front of the White House – in rain. Later demonstrators with similar bonfire also unfurled a banner demanding voting rights for women from President Wilson. The year was 1918.

The Suffragist in the final photograph appears to be smiling with success at getting arrested directly in front of the White House.

Woman suffrage was enacted nationally two years later in 1920.

– Harris & Ewing collection at the Library of Congress.

Anatolia

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan (immediately above, photographed by Ebru Ceylan) shared the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2011 for Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Most worldwide lists included it among the top 10 movies released in 2012. I noticed in the credits that the film was shot in Cinemascope, which I suppose to be a rarely-used, vintage film-format now, but it looked consistently eerie and vibrant in the many lingering, deep-field landscape-shots of the "vast Anatolian plain" – seen by day and by night, in rain and in sun – even though the film's action took place within 24 hours. The landscape was half the story. Muhammet Uzuner may have been the other half, with the leading role of warm-but-troubled-doctor. During one memorable, extended passage, he broke through the invisible "fourth wall" and stared directly into the camera, holding its gaze while doing subtle and mysteriously significant things with his face. In a film paced like this one, such a moment of daring created excitement at the same level as a chase scene.

On the other hand, all women's roles were minor roles. Counting back, I realize there were really only two roles for an individual woman, each in a different plot-segment. And in each case, the woman was beautiful and young and barely had a word to speak, while yet fascinating every man present and stunning them into a silence of their own. In the general absence of women, the male characters told stories to one another, mostly about dead or otherwise absent women. These stories were always about young, beautiful, silent, unpredictable, life-ruining women. Woman as object. Never woman as subject. I'm not sure I altogether believed before that the idealization of women should be read not as flattery but as an expression of their subjugation (a standard olden-days feminist position) – yet this film seemed relentlessly committed to demonstrating exactly how the traditions of idealization and subjugation go together.

SFPD

Another experimental session under dim winter light at the corner cafe, trying to frame compositions where there don't appear to be any occurring naturally, trying to refine the clarity of black and white, trying to take advantage of any small event that occurs while I happen to be watching, like a police car blocking a lane of traffic (plus the entire crosswalk) on a one-way street – by pointing itself the wrong way. But I am at the same time sure this police car was behaving exactly according to the manual and doing the proper police thing.

Violent Energy

"Even in these small-scale rural construction jobs you feel the American love of violent energy; crews riding around with unconcealed delight in the power and deafening racket of these machines."

James Lasdun
Times Literary Supplement
9 April 2010










Image source is here.

May Day

May Day parades with red flags waving may be a long-lost memory in Moscow, but remain a living activity in San Francisco. Today unfortunately it rained on our parade.







Damp idealists of many stripes trudged up Dolores toward Market under impassive police supervision.




Correction: the same friend who has chastened my inaccurate online flights of rhetoric in the past informs me that in fact there were 25,000 May Day marchers in Moscow this year, "including 2 or 3 thousand members of the Communist Party" so there were undoubtedly many more red flags waving there than here.