— 2 years ago(June 12, 2023 06:21 AM)

look: here and below are a few of the 250 portraits taken by
François Brunelle
since 2000 for his ‘I’m not a look-alike!’ project.
Photograph:
François Brunelle
.
The enduring fascination of discovering a lookalike – and the darker side of seeing double.
For a week, I put it off. My deadline crept closer, but I did not want to click the button, I did not want, actually, to “find my doppelgänger”. Perhaps I could write around it, I suggested, weakly. I went to lunch; I kept my eyes on the pavement for fear of catching my own eye.
The subject of doppelgängers swims regularly in and out of popular culture, mirroring, revealing and bringing varying degrees of discomfort.
Naomi Klein
’s new book grapples with the idea of a doppelgänger after the writer and academic realized she was regularly mistaken for
Naomi Wolf
. On Twitter, recently, she asked her followers if they’d ever encountered their own lookalike and the replies were filled with familiarly gripping stories, including a comedian who’d been on stage when, as a whole, the audience and he started to become aware of his lookalike sitting in an early row – the two went on to perform the set as a double act.
Every few months there is a tabloid piece featuring similar stories, illustrated with photos of two people laughing side by side, amazed to have met their twin on a plane, or at a wedding – these are framed as beautiful coincidences, we meet the subjects when the shock is fresh and they’re grinning with wonder.
Deborah Levy
’s new novel explores the same theme – travelling through Europe, a pianist called
Elsa
comes across her double. “My startling thought at that moment was that she and I were the same person,”
Elsa
says. “She was me and I was her. Perhaps she was a little more me than I was.”
Doubles
.
: Photograph:
François Brunelle
.
Those stories relied on coincidence, a sort of supernatural chance, which one can bypass now, if they choose, by downloading an app. But before this long list of lookalike apps existed, before
Google Lens
allowed a person to upload a selfie then click to find every other stranger on earth that shared their features, seeing your doppelgänger (the word translates from German as “double walker”) was considered a bad omen. The very worst omen, in fact. According to both English and German folklore, it meant death would follow. I tried talking to my editor again: “I’m just trying to write a fun piece, I’m not ready to die.”
The feeling of seeing doubles in those tabloid stories is similar to a kind of seasickness. It’s the differences that destabilise you – the same but different variations of nostril and ear, which cause that familiar psychic wobble. You feel it when looking at the work of
Canadian
artist
François Brunelle
, who was inspired to find and photograph more than 200 pairs of unrelated doppelgängers after being taken aback, he said, by how similar he looked to
Rowan Atkinson
. The picture series, I’m Not a Look-alike!, which took 12 years to put together, features men and women who stare out of the frame with the same round gazes, the same low brows (as seen on the previous page).
When the project went viral, it was brought to the attention of
Dr
.
Manel Esteller
, a researcher at the J
osep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute
in
Barcelona
, who recruited 32 pairs of
Brunelle
’s look-alikes to take DNA tests and complete questionnaires about their lives. What was the explanation for these doppelgängers, he wondered? What were we seeing? He found that the 16 pairs who were “true” lookalikes, according to facial-recognition software, shared significantly more genes than the others that the software deemed less similar.
Doubles
.
: Photograph:
François Brunelle
.
“Now there are so many people in the world,”
Dr
.
Esteller
explained to the
New York Times
, “the system is repeating itself.” Not only are apps that can find our doppelgängers multiplying, the population is multiplying, too, at a pace which means we are all more likely to have one. I just…don’t want to meet her.
To be fair, I should’ve known what I was getting into when I started writing. One reason I’d been led here, to this piece, and this list of apps and the blankest selfie I could muster, was a series of news stories about people tracking down their doppelgängers with malicious intent. When the body of a young woman was found last August in a parked car in
Germany
, her family identified her as
Sharaban K
, 23, a
Munich
-based beautician with
Iraqi
roots. But after the postmortem, questions were raised. The victim was eventually named as
Khadidja O
, an
Algerian
beauty blogger – the two looked (said police) “strikingly alike”. They discovered that several similar looking women had been contacted on social media by
Sharaban K
in the week before
Khadidja
’s death – in January she was arrested.
“Investigations have led us to assume that the accused wanted to go into hiding because of a family dispute and fake her own death to that effect,” said the s