A Canadian photographer with a unique style of fusing the faces of family members to highlight their shared traits and physical differences is taking his “Genetic Portraits” series to a Montreal gallery after gaining international attention via the Internet.
Quebec City artist Ulric Collette’s Photoshopped portraits, with half of each subject’s face contributing to the final composition, can be viewed at his own website — ulriccollette.com — and have also been featured on media sites around the world, most recently the Daily Mail newspaper in Britain.
The results of the blended pictures are sometimes startling, such as a mother-daughter amalgam that looks like one person. In another case, a father and son look vaguely alike, but the dad’s time-worn skin and dramatic differences in the two men’s hairstyles create a bizarre hybrid.
“The Genetic Portraits series started in 2008, and the first photograph was the one with me and my son Nathan,” Collette told Postmedia News. “At first I was trying something else in Photoshop with our two visages and I came up with this. I posted it online — on Flickr at the time — and it went viral in one night, so I started doing the same thing with other people in my family and the project has grown to become what it is today.”
A selection of Collette’s double portraits, many of the faces seamlessly merged through digital photo-editing, will be on display throughout October at Montreal’s Seagram Art Gallery.
“Collette’s photographs demonstrate the deep pleasure we take in looking at human faces and their variations,” the gallery stated ahead of Tuesday’s exhibition opening. “By splitting their faces in half and then blending them together in a single face, he highlights the mysteries of genetic resemblances and differences, and creates interesting new people that are sometimes quite normal looking and other times far from it.”
Collette, who also works as a graphic designer, said he’s always searching for clients interested in having a family member join them in posing for a genetic portrait.
“We all have a family member that we look like or that people say that we look alike,” Collette said. “Sometimes it’s our father or mother, in some other case a brother, sister or even cousins. And when we see the photograph it makes us (even me) wonder if it’s true when someone says, for example: ‘You look so much like you father!’ Or, ‘You have your mother’s eyes.’”
rboswell@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/randyboswell
