"The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera." - Dorothea Lange

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

i'm not a look-alike


Have you ever been told that there’s someone else out there, someone in Buffalo or Tulsa or Paris, France, who looks like you? Just like you?

I once read that we all have a twin somewhere. An exact duplicate of ourselves, someone we’ve not met, but who would knock our socks off if we ever passed on the street.

I always wanted a twin. Someone just my age, just my size, just my frame of mind. Someone I could pin the blame on when I got in trouble, someone who would never question the obvious – that I am funny and smart and pretty - someone who’d know just what I was going to say and save me the trouble of having to say it if I didn’t feel like talking. A person who would fill up the space between the rest of the world and me, protect me from being alone.

That is the opening to the artist statement that I wrote to accompany my project about identical twins (“The Space Between”).

Just recently, my sister (the two of us are beginning to look more and more alike) brought the work of French Canadian photographer François Brunelle to my attention. He photographs unrelated look-alikes, doppelgangers. Brunelle’s goal is to find 200 sets, and he travels the world to photograph them. He doesn’t necessarily match people up; rather, he asks for couples to submit photos to him. So, if you know your unrelated look-alike, and the two of you can get together with the photographer, I imagine you, too, could be part of this project!
Here are a few examples from the series, which he calls “I’m Not A Look-alike”.



















1 comment:

Anonymous said...

So interesting. Some could really pass for twins, all for siblings at a least. - Frank