The Brooklyn Rail

In its printed physicality, Jonathan Hollingsworth’s Call Me Timothée challenges the paradoxically ephemeral permanence—the digital footprints in the cyber-sand—of a last-season, by now household meme to the foremost unplugged: the celebrity look-alike contest. It opens democratically: “I’m Timothée. You’re Timothée. We’re all Timothée”—a digital native’s “I’m Spartacus” attributed to an unnamed attendee of YouTuber and grassroots event organizer Anthony Po’s Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest staged in Washington Square Park in October of 2024. The following images document the lookalike craze at its origin and apex, employing mostly Polaroids and some digital images seized from social media. The result, a mélange of aestheticized instant-film attendee portraits and expository phone-camera shots, questions the nature of the lookalike contest and its cultural moment. It’s either a meme, meme-ing its own approaching obsolescence by appropriating the art book, or a riot of erotics and fandom requiring the material timelessness of Polaroid and printed page.

In an included interview between Hollingsworth and Po, the organizer intones a nonchalance about precisely why the contest and its international duplicates—Paul Mescal, Harry Styles—resonated so broadly; he offers, “I think people yearn for whimsical things.” Hollingsworth speaks to an underlying irony in the event, while Po claims it to be whimsy. To the photographer, the competition “was the perfect amusement to roll off the assembly line of the fun house of our cultural moment”—a cheap thrill, a mass-produced oddity, and a circus. Admittedly and artificially targeted for virality in its aesthetically punkish publicity and organization, the contest and its art book documentation were always precisely this: living memes with some money behind them.

But these competitions were widely received as something else—spasms of a Beatlemania long-dormant in the zeitgeist, gauges for an erotics of the collective heterosexual. What better medium than the sentimental Polaroid to document a frenzied international trend that drove hordes of (mostly) young men, only vaguely resembling today’s internet heartthrobs, to public grounds where (mostly) young women evaluated each doppelgänger’s likeness to her favored celebrity crush?

Hollingsworth admits that the “initial plan” for his book was to neatly arrange traditional portraits of the attendees with their interviews. Amidst the contest’s premature collapse, as the NYPD dispersed crowds and fined event leadership for organizing without a permit, he had only the Polaroids to fall back on. While this fundamentally altered the process of the book-work, Hollingsworth waxes poetic on the fatedness of this reframe: “I realized this version of the event better captured whatever I’d set out to create.” Dialing up the romance of good-old-fashioned sexual fanaticism, he claims it was “so beautiful that it could break the heart of anyone with a pulse.”

Yet with each portrait centered lonely in a thick frame of white space, one can imagine the Instagram user-interface encroaching from the margins: a visual throughline between older and newer modes of celebrity worship. If the fanaticism of Beatlemania was agented by lust, and contemporary fandom by some combination of irony and whimsy, Call Me Timothée is in limbo between analog and internet. Where the dreamily low resolution of each portrait evokes a bygone golden-age of heartthrobs, the mimeticism of each attendee’s Timmy drag sobers the nostalgic impulse. This is the anachronistic clash between subject and medium that Hollingsworth emphasizes by repetition. Each portrait, much like each portrait’s sitter, is a doppëlganger of the last; just as Hollingsworth oscillates between digital and instant film formats, so too must readers negotiate the prevailing lenses with which they approach these Timothées—whimsy, irony, eros.

This is perhaps why the most striking images in Call Me Timothée, though few in number, are those crisp and textureless digital candids: a spread of fliers from the event’s guerilla-marketing campaign, taped and wheatpasted to telephone poles, mailboxes, and scaffolding. Other digital images show Chalamet’s surprise appearance amongst fans and rival Timothées and a cloud of poised phone cameras. Anti-aesthetical in their documentarian purity, it is these images that reveal the truth of the contest—a strange and fleeting incarnation of internet sensibility donned in the bohemian wardrobe of collective lust. Already démodé to chronic netizens, Call Me Timothée ferrets the lookalike contest away from its online obsolescence to archive the event more permanently as the phenomenon it was: irony impersonating libido; the digital impersonating the authentic; the meme made, briefly, physical.