But in most of the 445 pictures being shown as part of the Striking Resemblance: The Changing Art of Portraiture exhibition at Rutgers Universitys Zimmerli art museum, there is one constant: a man. The same man, his picture taken in photo booths across three decades, from the 1930s and 1960s. The pictures belong to photo historian Donald Lokuta, who purchased the set after first discovering a few of the pictures at a New York antiques show in 2012. When he realized the seller had hundreds of similar pictures of the same man, he bought them all. As a historian, I knew this was very rare, but on a deeper level, I wondered, ‘Why would somebody want to take almost 500 photos of himself in a photo booth? In appearance, they are unremarkable.
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