For nearly two centuries, photography has sought to capture what our eyes can see. A face, a gaze, an expression. It has documented wars, revolutions, love stories, and families, always beginning from the surface of things. With Genetic Portraits, however, Canadian photographer Ulric Collette pushes portraiture beyond the skin, transforming it into a reflection on inheritance, identity, and the ties that shape us long before we are born.

Started in 2008, the series is based on a gesture that is both simple and astonishing. Collette photographs two members of the same family—father and son, mother and daughter, siblings, grandparents and grandchildren, even cousins—and digitally merges half of each face into a single portrait. The result is uncanny: some portraits appear to belong to a single person, while others highlight striking differences in age, eye color, or facial structure. Yet they all tell the same story: the resemblance that travels across generations.

The project does not photograph DNA in the scientific sense of the term. No photograph can directly reveal a person’s genetic makeup. What Collette makes visible are its traces: the facial features, proportions, and expressions that are passed down over time and that we instinctively recognize when we say that a child “has their father’s eyes” or their grandmother’s smile. Photography thus becomes a tool capable of turning a biological phenomenon into a visual experience.

This is precisely where Genetic Portraits challenges one of portrait photography’s deepest assumptions: that there is always a single individual in front of the camera. In Collette’s work, a face never fully belongs to just one person. It becomes a shared territory, shaped by family histories, inherited traits, and details that survive the passing of time. Identity no longer appears as something isolated, but as the result of a continuity that stretches across generations.

Ulric Collette himself describes the series as an exploration of the genetic similarities between members of the same family and of the fundamental questions they raise: who we are, where we come from, and how much of our identity is already inscribed in our features. His images do not seek definitive answers. Instead, they invite us to see the human face as a living archive, where every feature preserves the memory of those who came before us.

Perhaps that is the true strength of the project. It reminds us that every portrait tells a story far greater than the person standing before the camera. It tells the story of a family, an inheritance, and a history that began long before the shutter was ever pressed.

This article was created in collaboration with Luigi Falanga and Gaia Forlin, aka @super8otto.