This article explores the participation of photography in the construction of what Alan Sekula named a "criminal body", paying special attention to the Chilean case. From the early photography made in prison and police spaces to the images of criminals published by mass magazines, we analyze the transformations of the representation of the criminal subject between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, in a Chile that was trying to modernize the State and its institutions. The corpus analyzed allows us to review strategies before and after the installation of the Bertillon method and to argue that the image of an unwanted other could only be constructed by relationship and contrast with a repertoire of images inserted in the tradition of bourgeois photographic portraiture, cultivated during the nineteenth century.