Woman time travels through stunning family portrait recreations
Published 11:20 am Wednesday, December 31, 2014
- Christine McConnell.
Some people call her a photographer. Some say she’s a stylist. Some even know her more as a baker.
“I would call myself an artist more than anything,” says Christine McConnell. “I work in multiple mediums.”
And more recently, across multiple generations.
Based in Los Angeles, McConnell, 33, has built a substantial following — she currently has 115,000 followers on Instagram — for what the Daily Beast, in a profile from July, called “her immaculately conceived make-believe worlds” of “kitschy, idealized Americana given spiky, dark, twists.”
McConnell regularly pays photographic tribute to famous films, either with spot-on recreations (she’s a dead ringer for Kelly LeBrock in the iconic doorway pose from Weird Science) or off-the-wall interpretations (like the series of her on a date with Jason of Friday the 13th fame).
Even more fun — there’s often elaborately constructed, devilishly decorated desserts involved (the Daily Beast called her “Queen of Creepy Cookies”).
“I (take photographs of) a lot of baked things,” she says. “Alien Facehugger cookies and weird cakes.”
But her latest project to go viral is much more personal. McConnell realistically recreated six generations worth of portraits, all of them direct female descendents on her mother’s side, from her mother to her great-great-great grandmother.
The idea first came to her in early 2014 when her mother gave her an old red dress, the one McConnell’s seen wearing in the first photo of the series.
“Her mother had died and she was really depressed about it,” McConnell says, speaking of her mother. “My dad went out and bought her a really extravagant red dress. She always sort of associated the dress with that loss and stored it in the back of the closet. She was 32 at the time time of the picture and when I turned 32 she gave me the dress.”
McConnell says the gesture inspired her to find out more about her mother’s mother. And then her mother. And then her mother. She kept going.
“I was actually able to go back about 200 years.”
And along the way, she kept finding photographs. Ironically, the one that should have been the hardest to track down was the easiest, while the most recent photo, from 1989, was the most difficult to recreate.
“It’s funny, the oldest one, Martha, my great-great-great grandmother–we had this picture hanging in the house for forever and nobody actually knew who she was,” McConnell says. “We just thought she was this old ancestor, but obviously no one was going to get rid of it. I actually took the backing off to find out more information and it turned out she was the mother of my great-great grandmother.”
McConnell says the project took about a week to complete, and that the most time was spent on the photo of the woman she most resembles.
“The one that was the hardest was my mother’s because all of the others had pretty simplistic backdrops, but my mother was sitting in a wicker chair” — a wicker chair in a style McConnell says she couldn’t find anywhere. The nearly identical-looking chair she wound up sitting in for the photo she made herself.
It was worth it. Posted to McConnell’s Facebook page on Sunday night, the photos have already been featured on Today.com, The Daily Mail, the Huffington Post, and several other websites.
“I’ve actually gotten a ton of responses,” McConnell says, though not all of them positive.
“The reactions are across the board, really,” she says. “A lot of people think it’s really cool and unique, and some people think I’m a narcissist, which is kind of funny.”
McConnell says the project wasn’t born out of narcissism, but out of curiosity.
“I saw similarities in myself and each of these pictures and I wondered if I was in the same lighting and the same texture as the photo, would I be able to see more similarity,” she says.
Yes, she would.
“I’ve got my grandmother’s smile and my great-grandmother’s eyebrows.”
And in black and white, with a brooch clasped to the high neck of a period dress and with her hair pulled tightly behind her head, there’s even a resemblance between McConnell and her great-great-great grandmother Martha, who was born in 1821.
“These weird features seem to skip generations,” she says.