Anthropometrics – part of human factors design. Its roots lie in nineteenth century anthropological science, and forensics. Measuring the distances between eyebrows for evidence of criminality, correlating shapes of skulls with ethnicity, classifying fingerprints to aid forensic detection.

Today Nicole (Coleman) sent me news of the reopening of the Museo Cesare Lombardo in Turin.

Here’s how Nautilus describes it:

The Museum of Criminal Anthropology, dedicated to Cesare Lombroso, has reopened after years of restoration and access to specialist researchers only. The institution was founded by Lombroso in 1898 under the name “the Museum of Psychiatry and Criminology”, documenting his beliefs and research into detecting criminality through physiognomy.

The 400 skulls in his collection, including one belonging to the brigand Giuseppe Villella, were used by Lombroso to develop his theory of the “median occipital fossa”, a cranial anomaly that he believed contributed to deviant behaviour.

On show are drawings, photos, criminal evidence, anatomical sections of “madmen and criminals” and work produced by criminals in the last century. The exhibits also include the Gallows of Turin, which were in use until the city’s final hanging in 1865 and the possessions of a man known as White Stag, a renowned impostor who convinced Europe he was a great Native American chief. “But it is not a museum of horrors,” insisted Giacomo Giacobini, coordinator of the “Museum of Man” project that the Lombroso collection will be part of. Rather, the museum is intended to recall positivistic era in science, in which Turin played a key role, starting with Cesare Lombroso’s work.

Deathmask

The creation of the museum collections involved extensive interdisciplinary research by Lombroso in the fields of criminology, anatomy, psychiatry,psychology, sociology, ethnology, anthropology,linguistics, law, fine arts and medicine.

Lombroso’s own head is also on display, a century down the line, perfectly preserved in a glass chamber.

[Link: the official museum website]

[Link: Wikipedia on Anthropometrics]

From Alphonse Bertillon’s Identification Anthropométrique (1893)

Nicole picked this up from a fascinating site – Morbid Anatomy – its topics include medical museums, anatomical art, collectors and collecting, cabinets of curiosity, the history of medicine, death and mortality, memorial practice, art and natural history, arcane media … . Wonderful!

Some years ago Sam (Schillace) put me onto a Russian photographer, Sergey Larenkov, who combines old and new photographs of Leningrad/St Petersburg, then – WWII, and now.

They have haunted me ever since.

It’s not difficult to find the photos on the web; it only took me a few moments to find them again – [Link]

“Then and now” “This happened here” – an aspect of the archaeological imagination.

(James Cameron did something similar with Ghosts of the Abyss – Titanic “then and now”)

Of course, Victorian London didn’t look like this, but maybe it should have?

Surprisingly perhaps, the official film stills don’t capture this look:

Victorian backstreets

Holmes needed a shave

But the posters for the movie are completely in such an aesthetic:

Maybe this is a kind of media quiddity? The habitus of a medium, as I have described it – [Link].

A good long while ago I commented on the family photos of a friend and the way they seemed to embody the look of changing pasts – [Link]. Not just the changing styles and quotidian “period” detail, but the way a camera, its lens and film, translate a moment, an event, a life, a world.

More notes – the color of nostalgia, the patina of preservation, the innocence of the rural, and rural nostalgia.

Landscapes of the 1980s and 1990s will be remembered in the saturated color space of Fuji Velvia – [Link] and [Link], even when the images were not produced using this film.

I have been working on a portfolio of photos I had put to one side. They are of the old covered markets in Thessaloniki. I was visiting Kostas Kotsakis in April 2006.

More at archaeographer.com

Photographs taken after the death of a child were popular in the mid nineteenth century.

Daguerreotype, 1850s, eastern USA.

Boontberry Farm – organic produce

Wonderful stuff. Anthropometrics, collaborative work, community based, questioning representational forms.

Allotment. Residents of Malmo measured and concrete boxes made to fit them in. All arranged in the gallery in social groups, and as a kind of miniature city scape.

Domain Field. Whole body casts made of some 250 voluteers from the north of England. A team of welders fit light metal strips within the casts, modeling form with lightly articulated silver lines. No boundaries to the body this time. And they gently sway as you walk among them. Each has a number corresponding to the person cast, named at the entrance to the gallery.

I see that Lev Manovich is in residence at the Baltic soon.

And we (Tim Lenoir, Haun Saussy) are running our freshman course Bodies in Place again this fall.