lifestyle

Prepare to be stunned by these images

These images are called Exactitudes and they’re fascinating. They’re the work of Dutch photographer Ari Versluis and profiler Ellie Uyttenbroek, who got together in 1994 and started taking photos of every social group they could think of. In the last two decades, they’ve photographed everyone from stay-at-home-dads to fur-loving Italian women.

(See more of these images here)

Versluis and Uyttenbroek register their subjects in an identical framework, with similar poses and a strictly observed dress code. “They provide an almost scientific, anthropological record of people’s attempts to distinguish themselves from others by assuming a group identity. The apparent contradiction between individuality and uniformity is, however, taken to such extremes in their arresting objective-looking photographic viewpoint and stylistic analysis that the artistic aspect clearly dominates the purely documentary element.”