A photography project that captures people resembling the paintings they’re looking at has gone viral.
Stefan Draschan’s People Matching Artworks collection of around 500 photos has gained popularity due to the satisfying composition of similar clothes, hair or outright resemblance of people to great works of art.
His subjects do not know they are being photographed so his work requires a great deal of patience to line up.
Credit: Stefan Draschan
Draschan told Amateur Photographer: “I’ve always loved all kinds of art and just four years ago I started to take photographs.
“Of course I knew museum photographs from Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gottfried Schuh, Eve Arnold and especially Alecio de Andrade before, so this knowledge helped me to look out.”
Since 2015, he has taken photos in some of the most famous museums in the world from the Louvre in Paris to the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin.
Credit: Stefan Draschan
He generally finds the artwork that he wants to photograph and then it’s a matter of waiting for the right match to come by.
While Draschan admits that he does spend a lot of time in museums, he doesn’t mind waiting around.
“I’m happy with about 50 of the 500 in this series and have various criteria like ‘how long did it take me’, ‘how many people stood around’, ‘how much did i have to crop from the original size’ and so on…,” he said.
This image from earlier in 2017 is one of Draschan’s favourite, Credit: Stefan Draschan
“In this image, everything went perfectly. I was 2 minutes in the Gemäldegalerie Berlin, in the first room, and his girlfriend went on to the next so she was not in the frame.”
Draschan uses DSLRs to take his photos, with a number of his recent People Matching Artworks images taken with a Nikon D610.
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