Police photography of Swiss itinerants 1852–53

Abstract

Among the holdings of the Swiss Federal Archive in Bern there is a collection of about 220 photographic portraits of itinerants without citizenship from the mid-nineteenth century. As far as we are aware this is the earliest preserved collection of police photography. Such police photography was being used quite early in France and Belgium, 1 but until this moment a clearly defined section of the population had not been photographically catalogued in such a systematic and standardized form from the point of view of the authorities. In the portraits made between October 1852 and the end of1853, Carl Durheim, a lithographer and photographer from Bern, created a series of exceptional and unique ethnographic documents of members of the itinerant culture of the nineteenth century. These photographs reflect the view which bourgeois culture of the nineteenth century took of outsiders and sought to control them, but they are also witnesses to the self-image of this culture.