François Brunelle’s portraits place people with strikingly similar appearances together. The 2014 article attempted to explain those resemblances through a claim about 500 human templates. It supplied no scientific evidence for that number or for the proposed mechanism, so the claim should not be presented as fact. A 62-year-old Montreal-based photographer has spent the last 12 years scouring the world for complete strangers who have alarmingly similar physical characteristics. The portraits show selected resemblances. They do not test a theory about a fixed number of human forms, nor can appearance alone establish the genetic relationship between two people.
The two gentleman above are an excellent example of two complete strangers that not only look like brothers, but twins, yet they are not related.
“I was inspired by 2 things,” said photographer Francois Brunelle. “First I used to see look-alikes all over since a very long time. Second, my own likeness with TV character Mr Bean.”
I’ll let you be the judge of Brunelle’s resemblance to the British character.
The comparison becomes more interesting when it stays with the portraits themselves. Hair, expression, posture and clothing can reinforce a resemblance or make differences easier to see. Placing two people in the same frame also gives the viewer a direct comparison that memory alone would not provide. One shared feature may attract attention first, while a longer look reveals how much remains individual. A resemblance is therefore both the starting point of the project and an invitation to look beyond the first impression. None of those observations requires a claim that beliefs or desires rewrite a stored bodily template.
A gallery assembled around lookalikes cannot tell every reader how likely they are to have a close match. Selection is part of the project: these pairs were photographed because a resemblance had already attracted attention. The images are compelling examples, not a population survey or a probability calculation.
Sources: Francois Brunelle, Light Workers, Prevent Disease
Update, 2022: scientists tested the lookalikes’ DNA
Brunelle’s portraits later became the basis of a genetic study. Researchers led by Manel Esteller at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute in Barcelona recruited lookalike pairs from his project and, in work published in Cell Reports in 2022, ran their faces through three facial-recognition algorithms. Sixteen pairs were matched by all three, and nine of those also clustered together genetically, sharing thousands of common DNA variants. Their epigenetic profiles and gut microbes mostly differed. As the researchers put it, “Genomics clusters them together, and the rest set them apart.” The study involved a small number of pairs and does not support a fixed number of human “templates”, but it suggests that some unrelated lookalikes resemble each other partly because they share common genetic variants.
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Resemblance is a photographic subject, not a human template
A portrait sitting introduces another layer of collaboration. People may choose similar expressions or allow differences in posture to remain, changing how the pairing reads. The photographer’s framing then determines whether the viewer attends first to the shared outline or to the two separate individuals. That is enough to sustain the project as portraiture, without attaching an unsupported account of human biology to it.
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