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Dead Ringer. By Yael Eban & Matthew Gamber.
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Photographs by Yael Eban & Matthew Gamber
TBW Books, Oakland, CA, 2024. 120 pp., 95 plates, 9x12".
It’s no secret that the world is awash in photographs. The current image glut fills every conceivable vacuum, mostly via screens. This may seem like a condition of the times, but before this wave came an analogue precursor. The early 20th century enjoyed its own photographic Big Bang, as cameras, film, and print technologies became widely accessible and affordable for the first time. Small photographs, postcards, and drugstore snapshots spewed off in all directions like primordial particles. The aftershocks still reverberate today in flea markets, albums, garage sales, and basement boxes.
These physical materials have provided the grist for numerous found-photo curations. Anonymous snapshots have been collected into books of all shapes and sizes, and the pace seems to have picked up with the new millennium. But to date none have yet taken the approach of Matthew Gamber and Yael Eban. Both authors have extensive experience as photo archivists. Together they’ve spent the past seven years scavenging anonymous snapshots from various sources.
So far so good. But their collaborative book Dead Ringer offers a twist on the found photo genre. Unlike previous curations, this one is organized into pairings grouped by origin. Each set features multiple prints spawned from a single negative. These identical twins (plus a few triplets and quartets) were separated at birth, then made their way through the world over the course of decades. Through the remarkable efforts of Eban and Gamber — how in the world did they track down and match all these snapshots? — they’ve been reunited. Pictures respond to destiny, the photo version of quantum entanglement.
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As one might expect, some twins bear closer family resemblance than others. In the book’s opening pages, the pairings are literally dead ringers. With no introductory text, initial mountainscapes and city skylines pose a quandary to the reader. What exactly are we looking at and why has the same photo seemingly been printed twice? The riddle resolves in the pages to follow, as minor physical artifacts begin to delineate clear differences. One print is slightly larger than its twin. Another shows handwriting. Another print seems to have been left in the sun too long, for its colors do not match its sibling. Just as with human twins, events gradually leave their marks. The singularity devolves to individuals.
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For readers, these minor tics and baubles prove to be quite stimulating. After we’ve been put on alert to look for small differences, they seem to crop up everywhere. Photos sport punctures, tears, stains, notes, commercial banners, and more. The eye moves between pairings searching for discrepancies, and Dead Ringer becomes a treasure hunt not entirely dissimilar from the act of photography. In the words of Todd Hido, it’s “one of those rare books that forces you to stop in your tracks and set aside all distractions in order to deeply look at the details of the images contained within.”
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Dead Ringer’s no-frills design lets the photographs do most of the work. It’s an open-spine body wrapped in an unbleached paper dust jacket. If the cover had a separated-at-birth twin, it might be a brown paper grocery bag. The photos are reproduced at actual size and finish, paired across double spreads with scars intact. Broad white pages provide plenty of room for detailed snooping. After all the photographs have been digested and decoded, Clément Chéroux chimes in with an anecdotal afterword. “Photography….seems to have been born under the sign of Gemini,” he notes in a roaming digression that broaches genetics, overshadowed twins, Talbot, Benjamin, and Arbus. Coming after an entirely visual feast, the essay is a nice intellectual dessert. It fits the photos so well they might have been separated at birth.
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