This Photographer Brings Together Total Strangers Who Look Like Twins

This Photographer Brings Together Total Strangers Who Look Like Twins

We’re all said to have a doppelganger — someone who looks just like us. And that has never been apparent more so than in this photo series. One photographer tasked himself with taking portraits of people from all around the world who look not only related, but near-identical to each other.

Canadian photographer François Brunelle is the mastermind behind the project, titled “I’m not a look-alike!” Fascinated with the human face since 1968, he began taking portraits before launching this series. Over the past 16 years, he has shot almost 250 images of two total strangers posing together, sharing a very similar resemblance to each other.

Interestingly, he finds his subjects anywhere across the world, usually when traveling or sometimes through people putting themselves forward before uniting any two that look alike in order to capture them together. He says:

I found my first subjects simply through people I knew who looked alike. Then, as the media covered my project, more people came forward to take part.

A page of his website now invites anyone to submit images if they know two people who look alike. See more of his work at his site or on Instagram.

All images François Brunelle and used with permission.

Jack Alexander's picture

A 28-year-old self-taught photographer, Jack Alexander specialises in intimate portraits with musicians, actors, and models.

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18 Comments

This makes me think that Hospitals mix up babies WAY more than we know. =P

Agreed! Amazing!

Doesn't work at all with the 2 asian girls. For that one only, it seems that he's like many people for who asian all look the same. They aren't alike and far away to look like twins. The rest is good.

Ah, 4 people who think all Asian people look the same 😊

I logged in to say exactly this. If he thinks that they look the same, he could have picked any two asians of a similar age and gotten the same result.

Actually they are very similar types - I live in Asia, married to an Asian women and lived 14 years in Asia. The types on the picture are very similar. Anybody with any experience in Asia could tell you right from the start that these two women were likely not Japanese nor Korean btw, so your "two Asians look the same" doesn't work. Not surprised that the people taking offense are white.

Married to a Chinese woman, lived in China for 16 years. When I was a kid, people use to say that all people from Africa look the same. Now that people are use to see them, they think different. It's now the turn of Asian people. Even if in my country, the Chinese community is the biggest in Europe, with also a lot of Cambodian, Laotian, people don't know them really well (culture but also physical appearance) and people can't make a difference. As for my wife, for her a lot of Caucasian look alike.

Oh stop 🙄 They resemble each other, they are not identical. Just like all the other pairs of people. They obviously agreed they look alike because they participated in the project.

Me being Asian, I can tell that they DO look very alike, it's just the girl in the front has more prominent and slanted eyes. Their facial shape is similar and they both have reasonably flat noses. They both have eyes that are closely set to each other and they have pretty large lips. If your point could be based on facts rather than biases of biases, it would be way harder to knock down.

I love these pictures! This shows how close we are as a family of humans! Beautiful

Not anymore they don’t.

Some are definitely uncanny lookalikes. Others are reaching for it a bit, and are helped along tremendously by matching the wardrobe or hairstyle. Crazy though.

Wonderful project. I would love to know how he approaches subjects, and gets them to take the time to dress the same and do the posing.

I like how he lit these photos.

Beautiful pics and like someone else said “captivating”. What’s irrelevant and so frustrating is we’re in 2020 and still focused on ignorance... I mean literally the dialogue about Asians. Get up to speed and get over yourselves. Nice work Francois and thanks for letting us share the fruit of your creativity.

If I have one, he has my sympathy.

I saw a guy in Iowa that looked so much like my friend back in VA. I didn't mention it because I thought that the guy might possibly use my friend's identity for fraud, maybe. (A bit paranoid I guess!)

As a psychology professor specializing in twin research, I was fascinated by this work! I did a series of studies on look-alikes, with Francois Brunelle's kind cooperation. I found that look-alike are not at all similar in personality. This result was important for critics of twin research who claim that identical twins are similar in behavior because people treat them alike, based on their appearance--if that were true the look-alikes should be similar in personality and their correlation was close to zero. Mist of them also did not pursue close relations with one another--they were different and we tend to align with people similar to us in behavior. Here is a link to the most recent paper:

https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/heritable/2018-segal.pdf