Damien Grenon - Double Face

To make this series, I first took a deep look at portraits, from the first, painted during the renaissance, to those of the present day.

For several years, I've been looking for portrait look-alikes among my acquaintances, first concentrating on those of portraits painted in the 19th and 20th centuries. More recently, I've widened my research to photographs.

Having found my subject, on the day of the photo session, I bring a mask taken from an enlargement of the basic portrait which I cut inhalf lenght size, choosing the left or right side, which I fit over the profile of my sitter.
For a profile photograph, I place a mirror behind the sitter in order to photograph the profile covered by the mask, and the half-face of the sitter at the same time.
Lighting, expression and other details are carefully chosen by to resemble the mask as closely as possible.
The aim is not to reproduce the original work; my sitters are free to choose their everyday clothes; showing their usual appearance and remaining modern, thus creating a rupture with former times.

Often, the present-day sitters and the portrait models have very different ways of life and activities. Their only point in common is the force created by my photograph. I've tried to establish a dialogue between the past and the living, which is the look-alike of the other? Does the appearance of the human being undergo slight mutations with time?

This might lead us to think that other mutations of genetic heritage, those which determine our physical features might have produced in another day, age and social group, the same effects in our physical appearance.