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September 12, 2012

Mugshot Doppelgänger: Here's What Current Celebrities Would Look Like as 1920s Criminals

There’s a strange connection that draws us into vintage photographs. Seeing doppelgängers (look-a-likes) in old pictures is our brain’s way of linking us to the past. We see what isn’t there - someone recognizable, a family member, maybe a friend, and then there are the ones that bear an uncanny resemblance to modern day celebrities. We’re so used to seeing celebrity faces on our TV, on blogs, and we even know what their mugshots look like. The tacky looking mugshots we have today are in stark contrast to the mugshots taken in the 1920s. Vintage mugshots have an eerie beauty to them that’s lost in current mugshot photography. What would celebrity mugshots, the ones we’ve become accustomed to seeing on TMZ, look like if instead they were taken in the 1920s?


Welcome to this photographic archive of celebrity criminal history. It’s a world similar to our own just shifted a little. It’s a site we like to call, Mugshot Doppelgänger. Created by Art Director, Michael Jason Enriquez, advertising student at Art Center College of Design, and currently a creative intern at ad agency RPA in Santa Monica. So here's a little background on the project:

“Glass plate negatives were unearthed in Sydney, Australia's police archives, I think, in 1989. They were mugshots of whores, gangsters, fraudsters, and crooks from the twenties. They made the rounds on different blogs a couple years ago.

“I remember seeing them and thinking how beautiful they were and how cheap the mugshots we have today look. The vintage mugshots were carefully composed, and it looks like the criminals are in wardrobe. Celebrities can't help but pose for the camera and that's evident in some of their mugshots, but as glamourous as our celebrities are they can't compete with how cool these 1920's criminals looked. Celebrity mugshots are plastered all over the web, on magazines, and in newspapers. They are the lowest form of photography, and yet they are everywhere. I wanted to see what it would look like if you took modern day celebrity mugshots and turned them into something worth looking at.

“I started with Lindsay Lohan because she had a lot of different mugshots to choose from. When I paired her up with a vintage mugshot that would work with her features it reminded me of the vintage doppelgänger of Nick Cage. Everyone thought that he was a vampire who lived forever or had a time machine. So I did more from Mel Gibson to Khloe Kardashian. That's pretty much how Mugshot Doppelgänger was born.”

Lindsay Lohan

Mel Gibson

Nick Nolte

Nicole Richie

Paris Hilton

Phil Spector

Robert Downing Jr.

Snooki Polizzi

Amanda Bynes

Charlie Sheen

Khloe Kardashian



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