Doppelgangers : does everyone have a double somewhere?

From a young age, Canadian photographer François Brunelle found himself noticing people around him who looked alike. 

““It’s something in their way of being – that's the key, their way of being – that looks like another person.” 

As he got older Brunelle was told he looked like Mr Bean – not that he knew who that was. 

“Then one day I was looking at the TV programme and I saw this gentleman who looked like me and was taking a bath and all kinds of catastrophes were happening around him and I just thought, my god, this is me on the screen, how come it’s me? 

“Until then I thought I looked like Mr Dean, James Dean, not Mr Bean,” he laughs. 

It wasn’t long until he began to dream about finding look-alikes and bringing them together. 

He’s spent the past 22 years doing exactly that, for his project I'm Not a Look-Alike. 

Initially he found people around Montreal with uncanny resemblances and captured their image. 

“Then I was stuck with no more lookalikes. I thought they would come by very easily but it’s not easy to find them.” 

He went to the media to try and get the word out. Before long it snowballed, and he was receiving thousands of emails. 

The project has evolved to where people from all over the world are taking part, if they identify someone who could pass as their double. 

“I thought, pretty naively so, that they would be so impressed by looking at the other person that looks just like them that I would get some kind of a super expressions and my photos would be fantastic because of that.” 

In reality, when the pairs meet, they are surprised for all of two seconds – not long enough to capture in a photo, he says. 

What began a simple art endeavour of black and white photography has evolved and raised the interests of scientists. 

Spanish researchers have examined 32 pairs photographed by Brunelle to see if they have any familial relationship, and to try to explain their similarities. 

None of the pairs were related  but 16 of the pair were found to share important parts of the genome, or DNA sequence. 

“Somewhere in the DNA there are some parts of it that will determine the shape of your nose, the colour of your eyes, the shape of your ears, the colour of your skin and everything like that."