“I’m a voyeur and a hunter. I prefer to look for matches with old masters or old art in general, matches with contemporary art are quite often and too easy for me, I want to make a bridge between the centuries, connect different times.”
– Stefan Draschan on People Matching Artworks
Austrian photographer Stefan Draschan likes it when things fit. For his ongoing project People Matching Artworks, Stefan watches as visitors to museums blend with the pictures they’ve stopped to look at. “It can sometimes take me years of observation until someone pops up,” Draschan says. “I was so nervous that four of the five photographs I took were blurred.”
One highlight was when Stefan has spotted the same man stood before a painting by German painter Caspar David Friedrich (5 September 1774 – 7 May 184) in January 2016 & July 2018 (below).
Why the man revisited the same painting we don’t know. We can only guess at why people stop by images that reflect their fashion, face, palette or demeanour. We are naturally drawn to things that we find aesthetically pleasing. So if we like red and wear a red dress, seeing a painting of someone wearing a red dress will likely draw us towards it.
Perhaps we less attracted to subjects in art that don’t look like us and more attracted to subjects that do? In an experiment, researchers blended the faces of heterosexual participants with the face of their partners to create a self-based morph. They then blended the faces of participants’ partners with a same-sex prototype to create a partner-based morph. Participants rated their self-based morph as more attractive than the partner-based morph. So we like the familiar and tend to find familiar faces and bodies more attractive than unfamiliar ones.
“I saw and captured the first match: a guy sitting in front of a Georges Braque in Berlin. Six months later in Munich, I saw a guy who looked like the huge Greek vase behind him, and then in Vienna, I was breathless when I discovered a woman sitting in front of a Vermeer,” says the photographer. “It then became clear that I would systematically look out for more of these coincidences.”
– Stefan Draschan on People Matching Artworks
“Maybe it is like being in love, I am just happy when something fits.“
– Stefan Draschan on People Matching Artworks
You can see more of Stefan Draschan’s work in this series on his tumblr and discover more on his website.
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