My series This Kind of Face captures impersonators who spend much of their daily life as costumed celebrity look-alikes. I initially set out to photograph the moment when the subject of a photograph lets down their guard and cracks appear in the everyday performance of the idea of self. Impersonators offer an exaggerated instance of this schism, representing conflict on the surface of their bodies in the uncomfortable conflation of their everyday existence with the aggrandized construction they attempt to embody.
As we look closely at the subjects of these photographs we see people who are not quite living out fantasies of being the rich and famous. Rather, they are look-alikes in the business of being a doppelganger, providing a tangible vessel for the audience’s already media-saturated imagination. Like my subjects, who fashion themselves after specific glamorized Hollywood and media constructions, I found myself over the course of the project impersonating the production of celebrity photographers such as Richard Avedon and Bruce Weber. I imitated Hollywood industry headshots and US Weekly paparazzo pictures, and created my own 4x5 photographic versions of Warhol’s Marilyns and dictators. Together the pictures in This Kind of Face function as playful hybridic references to the multiplicity of possibilities existing within the expansive field of photographic portraiture.
