Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.A Collection of photographs of twins, couples and duos; it hardly sounds like an eerie proposition. But these images, on display until 16 March at the Fondation Cartier art gallery in Paris, are far from being in the style of a cosy family album. In fact, visitors find them downright unnerving. "People feel strange when they see the exhibition," observes the gallery's press officer. "When they see all the doubles all around the room, the effect is bizarre." "Double vie, double vue" ("Twin life, twin sight") was conceived by the French writer and photography critic Patrick Roegiers as "an imaginary voyage in a double world". He chose images that "bring the face face-to-face with itself" and intends to open up a "vast field of inquiry into identity, resemblance and difference, similarity and dissimilarity."
He believes that twins are perfect subjects for photographs. "A painter executes a portrait on demand, to praise all that is unique in each individual," he explains. "Twins crystallise the fascination with resemblance that lies at the heart of photography." Some of the 150 works in the exhibition could pass for fashion shots; the elegant Beaton sisters, photographed by their brother in 1927, for instance. Others most emphatically could not; the obese and the weird also feature.
The sets of unreal twins, where images have been manipulated, are spookiest of all. Jean-Olivier Hucleux's Les Jumelles is the only canvas in the exhibition - and at first sight it could well be a photo itself. Hucleux returns again and again to his works, modifying them meticulously, using a magnifying glass and a fine-bristled brush. The oldest photographs in the show date from the 1850s and 60s, when the camera's potential for trompe l'oeil was being recognised as photographers started superimposing and manipulating negatives. Eugene Courret's Autoportrait A Deux Tetes shows him tranquilly gazing both ways at once, smoking only one pipe to show that no trick with mirrors is involved.
This looks technically simple enough, however, compared to the manipulations possible a century or so later. Keith Cottingham, in his Fictitious Portraits, uses his computer. He mixes a selection of photographed features and bodies with images of clay moulds of his own face to create his perfect twins. His works are so far removed from traditional photography that he prefers to consider them as paintings; they are as shocking in their way as some of the grotesqueries of Diane Arbus (whose photographs are also in the exhibition). Here Cottingham is parodying the western preoccupation with physical perfection; his twins are lovely and coldly inhuman at the same time, beautiful faces with features that don't quite fit.
! Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, tel: 00 33 1 42185651
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments