The Man who Dresses Up as his Ancestors

Many of us honor our ancestors in many different ways. Peruvian artist and photographer Christian Fuchs is obsessed with his illustrious ancestors and spends months painstakingly recreating portraits of them, posing for them himself whether the ancestors were men or women.

The walls of his elegant apartment overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Lima’s bohemian Barranco district are covered with paintings of his aristocratic European and Latin American ancestors. But if you look closer, you soon realize that many of the portraits are, in fact, photographs of the 37-year-old himself, dressed up as his relatives. The results are amazing.

You can read more about Christian Fuchs and view a number of photographs of Fuchs’ ancestors alongside modern photographs of himself in an article by Jane Chambers in the BBC News web site at http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-38828042.

My thanks to newsletter reader Lori Herman for telling me about this story.