My tags got too long again. Had this in drafts (vibing on progesterone and thinking about masks/mischief and nineteenth-century state paradigms of control/deviance) but I came across this same photo in the wild/research a couple weeks ago.
She was a ("suspected") sex worker. The original photo includes a hand-written note, dating it 11 October 1874 and naming her as "de Beyren (La Comtesse)." It was a self-promotional portrait she had taken before it ended up as File 329 in the "Register of the Ladies Galantes" (BB1 registry) of the Paris police division known as "Service of Morals" (Cabinet of the Prefect, 1st Division, 2nd Office, Service des Mœurs).
Collected between 1861 and 1874, "moral agents" kept the register to track the "perversion" and "insubordination" of 415 sex workers of Paris. The police describe the women they're tracking as "insoumises"--rebellious, insubordinate, unruly. Among the 415 women, the files include portraits of 143. Many of the photos were originally commissioned by the workers themselves, as promotions and advertisements for their dances/performances/services, before they were co-opted by the police.
Police photography became an essential tool/method by the 1890s of Pinkerton agents, counter-revolutionary and surveillance departments, US police forces tracking Black residents and union workers, British/German/French officials monitoring "crime"/dissent, and US military officials tracking anticolonial dissidents in the Philippines. Though state use of photography to monitor transgression was being experimented with on the sex workers of Paris earlier, in the 1860s. (Notably, the police's fear/anxiety in response to dissent after the rebellious fervor of the Paris Commune of 1871 may have influenced police/state to pursue the use of photos like this.)
A historian in a 2006 text analyzed some written records of the BB1 files, but it apparently remained difficult to encounter the photos of the women outside of limited museum/gallery exhibitions.
Though Clara Bouveresse had a nice article synthesizing both, from 2024 (which includes plenty of the photos, including that of the anonymous La Comtesse de Beyren; while the Countess chose to withhold her name, most of the women attached their names to their portraits): Clara Bouveresse, "From advertising promotion to police surveillance: Photographs of courtesans (1861-1874)," Clio. Women, Genre, History, Vol. 1, no. 59 (2024), pages 207-231.
Bouveresse describes the deliberate play with and manipulation of image/representation/expectation by the sex workers; the rising affordability of circulated print material among bourgeois audiences; and the police's simultaneous vilification of yet fascination with "vice," an "oscillation between seduction, curiosity, and moral condemnation." (More context: Portraiture circulation corresponds to Victorian-era rise of "celebrity"/print marketing, though predates the 1880s/1890s, when cococttes/sex work may have been more-visibly the object of Parisian bourgeois discourses of repulsion/fascination/"modernity.") But she also uses the files to acknowledge the rise of photography as a utility of policing.
So-called "police photography" later became a central/critical tool of US, British, and French police/surveillance institutions in both colonial and metropolitan settings at the turn of the century and in earlier twentieth century. (Think: Pinkertons, Chicago cops of the 1890s, tracking transnational "radicals" in Europe, workplace strikes, President McKinley's end.) Photography was also essential to the other central/critical tool of policing at that time: the also-originating-in-France "Bertillon system."
This "bertillonage," developed by French cop Alphonse Bertillon, was interested in categorizing/taxonomizing bodies ("anthropometry," body-measuring), and depended on photos to track subjects/"offenders." Basically, akin to mugshots. From this, the notion of the "filing cabinet" as a tool of state power is also strengthened.
The Bertillon System became widespread in practice in US/Europe in the 1890s. Same time that police photography/filing cabinets did, too. What else became popular tool in the 1890s? Fingerprinting.
British official William Herschel developed/popularized fingerprinting among police. Herschel first experimented it while he was a colonial officer in India and made a local contractor imprint his hand on a legal contract. He sent copies of his experiments to Francis Galton, fellow Brit and infamous "founder of eugenics."
It came full circle: Galton got really into anthropemetry/body-measurement (he was Charles Darwin's cousin, after all) and, as Bouveresse importantly points out in her article, Galton developed the method of "composite portrait" to "categorize" people as "types."
(I'm thinking again of Ravi Sundaram's e-flux article, where he cites Taussig's description of Herschel, who Taussig says was influenced by "a colonial administration dependent on writing and signatures" which had a "fear of massive fraud" and dissent, so "British administrators unable to discern ... Indian subjects ('they all look the same')" turned fingerprinting into "a type of modernizing sorcery by the colonial bureacracy." But we might add police photography to this modernizing magic. Sundaram acknowledges this: "Allan Sekula once wrote that the central innovation of nineteenth-century police photography was not the camera but the filing cabinet." Maybe so! Both the fingerprint and the photograph, these forms of body measurement and surveillance, collected together in the filing cabinet. Bouveresse, to her credit, in this article, also cites Sekula, who wrote in 1986: "Bertillon sought to blend the image in the archive, where Galton undertakes to blend the archive into photography.")
The Countess and her "insubordinate" colleagues were early subjects (victims) of this trend.
If the 1880s/1890s saw the rise and institutionalization of fingerprinting, police photography, and filing cabinets, then it's notable that French police were already systematically practicing this shit on women in the 1860s/1870s.
Bouveresse acknowledges the potential significance of widespread rebelliousness after which Paris police formalized their photography project among sex workers and beyond: "In the BB1 register, the presence of photographs does not yet have an official or explicit utility function. It seems to be part of the administrative zeal, the tast for collection [...]. At that time, many police officer felt that they knew the populations under their control [...]. The year of the Commune of Paris, in 1871, marks a turning point. [...] Photographs of accused people began to be produced methodically by maritime prefectures and military courts."
(Also: In 1871, the same year as the Commune, the French nation-state also lost the Franco-Prussian War, in which the victor re-established itself as the German Empire, potentially contributing more anxiety to French police/institutions.)
Bouveresee notes that between 1874 and 1882, Parisian police had collected 75,000 portraits.
The "Register of Convictions for Morals" (the BB3 registry) from the same Service of Morals appears like a taxonomy, a field guide, a textbook. Pages are bifurcated down the middle: Text documenting "crimes" on one side, and photos of the unclothed women on the other side.
Like a "scientific" cataloguing of people, reduced to state intelligibility as mere "criminals."
Alongside the Countess in the files is "Alice la Provencale," a "former public ball dancer," pictured smiling while lacing (un-lacing?) her boots, and whom the police say engaged in the "vices" of "lubricity" and "homosexuality."
I like the photo of "Emma Brach" (1 February 1873, File 116), who is rolling her eyes as she sits atop a desk, one leg raised, displaying her leather boot.
Emma's super-short dress features, across her chest, the emblem of a black bat, its wings sprawled.
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