All you have to is spend a few minutes in any social network such as Facebook or an instant messaging system such as Messenger to realize that portraits and self-portraits have taken over a central position in photography through avatars. At the same time, faced with this vast universe of faces, it is difficult not to perceive fertile terrain for fiction where, from one moment to the next, we nearly all represent some form of fantasy. A glamorous gesture, an incidental scene or the play of expressionistic lights transforms us into the lead player of our hopes and fears. It is as though photography itself mocked the testimonial value that many have imposed on it and demanded, with the complicity of imaginative avatars, a form of freedom that had been delayed for a long time.

It is easy to forget that the history of this medium has been ideal for such paradoxes since its origins: in 1840, Hippolyte Bayard created a self-portrait of himself as a drowned man and on the other side, he denounced the fact that his suicide was the result of the lack of financial support received from the French government, despite his discovery of a photographic process equivalent and prior to Daguerre's. Perhaps revealing his abandoned body in this first photographic setting gave him the tranquility to live another 37 years and enabled him to reveal the fragility of the image as testimony. At the same time, one could also argue that this photo provided a true reflection of his mood.

Over the next few decades, this concern with portraits as a fantasy enabling one to see the hidden or unexplored face of the person being portrayed, would be increasingly recurrent. So it was that during the last decade of the 19th century, Maurice Guibert recorded Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s image in many disguises and even in a photomontage where he poses for himself. It is highly likely that a previous photomontage should have included someone who was duplicated in the image. This may be where the incarnation of the doppelganger was glimpsed for the first time, in other words, an identical person but with different attitudes.

It is in this divergence that we see the seed of a current need. Since photography has collaborated with technological progress in reducing the world, it has shown us the infinite possibilities within reach of our lives and encourages us to dream about others. Like Mephistopholes to Faust, it offers us the possibility of leading a completely different life from the one we have. It invites us to face our own demons through the representation of the other egos, those alter egos that slip away through our fantasies or a doppelganger, that intriguing double that acts in opposition to us and deep down, may express everything we repress.