Photos of people posing with their art doppelgängers

Ever been wandering the hallow halls of your favourite gallery when you suddenly come face-to-face with your art-historical twin? A viral 2017 post by Bored Panda proved that you’re not alone. The meme website subsequently compiled a bunch of “suspected time travellers” striking poses with paintings that could well have been looking mirrors. Some resemblances are effortlessly uncanny, with the art appreciators even, serendipitously pictured in similar outfits to their likenesses in the frame, while others are unashamedly engineered, like the Henry VIII lookalike who rocked up to the museum with his feathered hat.

These pictures were right up the street of French artist Thomas Mailaender, whose off-beat album series, in collaboration with RVB Books, has seen him cull artefacts from cyber culture, internet memes and flea markets to reflect on the infinite ways photography shapes who we are. “I had been tracking these pastiche pictures for some time,” says Thomas. “One guy playing the fool in front of a painting is funny, but 100 people doing the same thing and it speaks to something much bigger.” Big enough for a long-term project, at least. Thomas has just published the eighth instalment of his series, Time Travellers, a quirky little book that recycles the Bored Panda compilation in monochrome.

black-and-white image of a man in a north face fleece posing with a painting who looks like him

“Is a gallery a place where the spectator has to remain silent and serious? Or is there a space in those institutions where the public can interfere?” asks Thomas. “I’m interested in pictures that transcend their initial symbolic value and reach something that we could call a ‘common heritage’. I love it when people join forces to construct a new photographic genre (or a ‘trend’, as we might call it in our Instagram era). Of course, the internet has amplified this possibility a great deal. This book, as with all the others in the series, would have been extremely hard, if not impossible, to make before the internet.”

The lure of seeing ourselves in another person is clearly a universal one; we probably didn’t even need the internet to remind us of that. The internet though, keeps reminding us. Back in 2018, Google’s Arts & Culture app kicked off a viral craze by rolling out Art Selfie. The feature invites you to put on your best Mona Lisa smile, take a selfie and wait for the machine learning algorithm to pair you with your “art double”. Last year the company went even further still, as Google launched Pet Portraits, which uses a similar technology to match your furry friend with a lookalike animal from an erstwhile era.

black-and-white image of a man in long t-shirt posing with a painting who looks like him

So, what exactly is the fascination? Potentially discovering a long-lost relative? The thought that we might really have had a pre-pre-existence? The idea that we’re immortal? All of the above? Whatever the kick, one truth really hits home here: that seeing, as the cliché goes, is believing, but believing is also seeing. This is, after all, amateur photography at its democratic best: when it invites a kind of mental karaoke through which we can picture ourselves in the shoes the other.

“The blog reminded me that we are all somehow still living in a world in which we share the same codes,” says Thomas. “We can, of course, see this as another sign of mass globalisation, where a guy from Alaska and a girl from the Philippines can share a single image folder, even if they will never have the chance to meet in ‘real life’. I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it is our reality now.”

black-and-white image of a man in posing with a painting of a medieval knight who looks like him

Surreal as it might have seemed, for those gallery-goers, the pictures of the doppelgängers certified their own reality. They saw themselves in the frame and were reminded that they existed. And then those reminders were shared all over the world. And then they inspired this book. Because what they photographed half a decade ago has inspired other people to do the same, what we find is that we’re collectively having lives, memories and futures together. And by translating an internet blog into book form, Thomas Mailaender has shown us that we’re responsible for the passage of such pictures through culture and history.

‘Time Travellers’ by Thomas Mailaender is published by RVB Books.

black-and-white selfie of a woman with a painting that looks like her

black-and-white image of a young boy posing in front of a painting of a family

black-and-white image of a man with white beard posing next to a painting of a knight who looks like him

black-and-white selfie of a man posing as decapitated head of john the baptist

black-and-white image of a man posing next to a painting of a cherub that looks like him

Credits

All images courtesy of Thomas Mailaender and RVB Books