Can You Figure Out What’s Strange About These Family Portraits?

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Pay a visit to photographer Jamie Diamond‘s website, and you’ll find that one of her projects is a series of family portraits. The images look like standard family portraits: the members are posed in different places and positions, there are older members and younger members; everyone’s dressed nicely, everyone’s smiling.

Look a little closer though, and you might notice that certain things are a bit strange… or should we say “stranger”?

The series is titled, “Constructed Family Portraits,” and here’s the twist: none of the people in the photographs are actually related.

Diamond created the series by finding random strangers in public and through Craigslist listings. Once she had groups of strangers she liked, she would tell them to meet her for a photo shoot in a rented hotel room.

The subjects would then be posed as a family and asked to smile as though they were.

“I am interested in the shifting paradigm of the traditional family structure and in the paradox of the familiar,” Diamond says. “The portraits are of actual people being themselves in an entirely new context; they intuitively follow the rules of the genre and the group they form for the camera ascribes them an identity.”

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Here’s a video showing some of the strangers interacting:

You can find more of Diamond’s work over on her website.

(via Feature Shoot)


Image credits: Photographs by Jamie Diamond and used with permission

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