'Celebrities that look alike' or 'Everybody has a twin'
I never feel like I’m among strangers. Anywhere I go I see faces that I’ve seen before. My myopia and astigmatism successfully prevent me from seeing fine details, which means that my brain acknowledges facial features mostly as shapes. Over the years my gray matter trained itself to recognize these shapes from a distance and I manage to pick out people that I know from a crowd without any difficulties even if all that I'm able to see is their backs. My eyes trained themselves to remember. They remember every curve and every angle of everything I've ever seen without any conscious involvement on my part.
About a decade ago I noticed that my visual memory also enabled me to tell who people that I would see in my everyday life reminded me off. I found that quite entertaining. I also thought it to be an excellent exercise for my memory. Whenever I would see a person that reminded me of someone else I would dig out my ‘past memory’ files to see if I could remember who that person’s ‘twin’ was and where and when I've seen them.
Shortly thereafter I moved on to famous people, because this way I could train my memory even further having had to remember celebrities’ names or movies they were in as well as their faces. Eventually I realized that I can play my own "Six degrees of separation" game because the more I looked at people the more I noticed how many features they had in common, which allowed me to get from a famous person A to a famous person B in a few short steps.
Over the years my Face Recognition ‘Brainware’ developed and allowed me to see momentary resemblances between people that otherwise don’t even look alike. I would see Robin William’s face and for a split second his facial expression would remind me of Marilyn Monroe (just an example). What I was seeing seemed so strange that I started to look for the photos of the celebrities that I thought looked alike just to prove to myself that what I saw in that split second was true, (which was often the case).
At some point I showed my little collection to friends and they found it amusing. Eventually I added it to my web site. It makes me a bit sad, (I almost wrote ‘deeply saddened’ but I decided not to infringe upon Tom Daschle’s signature phrase), that I get more comments about my celebrity look-alike collection than I do about my art, but who am I to judge what interests modern people… after all I’m the one who compiled this collection of celebrity twins. Enjoy, (and if you’re interested in more than famous faces take a look at my art). I’d love to hear from you!
