Family Resemblance

Family Resemblance is a multi-year photo project that documents people who are genetically related, and bear a strong resemblance to one another. As an adopted person, who grew up without any connections to my biological relatives, I’d always wondered what it was like to have a visual bond with someone else: something that clearly marked you as members of the same family. Did it make you love each other more? Did it link you together in a way that nothing else can? The first time I ever saw someone who looked like me was at age 45, when I received a photograph of my birth mother in the mail. Seeing myself in another person’s face was a lighting bolt so powerful that it divided my life into everything that happened before that moment from everything that happened after DNA testing has changed the world for so many adoptees—as well as birth families—because information that was previously hidden away by court order is now out in the bright sunlight. I have been reunited with biological family members, which has caused mixed emotions on both sides. As a way of understanding this experience, I started this photo project to document and celebrate people who are genetically related and bear a strong resemblance to each other. Over the course of three years I photographed about 700 people, and talked with them about what family, and family resemblance, means. Family Resemblance will be published by Daylight Books in the spring of 2020.