A photographer finds the descendants of famous historical figures to create incredible side-by-side pictures

He told Insider that it got him thinking: "Wouldn't it be interesting if descendants of very famous people from history were walking the streets? Wouldn't it be interesting if you could look into their faces and see hints of really famous people from the past? Are these people still walking amongst us?"

His photography series explores some of these questions.

The identity of the mysterious woman in da Vinci's famous painting remains unclear to this day, though it is widely believed to be a portrait of Italian noblewoman Lisa Gherardini, commissioned by her husband, Francesco del Giocondo, a Florentine cloth merchant.

Gardner tracked down Irina Guicciardini Strozzi, a descendant of Lisa del Giocondo (whose maiden name was Gherardini) and had her assume the same pose as her 15th great-grandmother for this powerful image.

"The world isn't white," he said. "So I held that thought in my mind and was contemplating for a long time how I could best represent the world around me and the world that I lived in, racially."

Not wanting to "go down the white male route and underplay the role of people of color and women, in American history, all history," Gardner said, he made efforts to find more diverse subjects.

He started working with the Smithsonian, expanding his series to the US and photographing the descendants of Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a suffragist famous for her role in the women's rights movement, pictured above next to her third great-granddaughter Elizabeth Jenkins-Sahlin.

His main criteria is that the historical figure is someone who interests him and is reasonably famous.

"I feel that there should be some degree of recognition or something extraordinary about that person," he said.

One such example is Robert Falcon Scott, the British naval officer famous for his Antarctica explorations, and doomed expedition to the South Pole, pictured above alongside his grandson Falcon Scott.

He usually has a portrait of the historical figure he wants to use picked out before contacting their descendant, so before he reaches out, he often checks to see they're around the same age as their ancestor in the image, and that they look similar enough to make for a good side-by-side picture.

"There's got to be something there that makes the magic," he said.

Pictured above, British political activist Emmeline Pankhurst, who helped UK women win the right to vote, and her great-granddaughter Helen Pankhurst, look like they could be sisters.

He asks people to dress and pose as their ancestors, and says that finding costumes — or often having them made — can be an obstacle, and prohibitively expensive in some cases.

Intricate backgrounds, such as the chains behind Isambard Kingdom Brunel in the picture above, whom Gardner describes as "one of the greatest engineers of the Victorian age" can also be difficult to re-create.

In terms of history, he says he sometimes wonders how people rationalize a lot of what their forebears did, but says that most of the people in his photo shoots have been pretty at ease with their ancestry.

LaNier was initially wary of celebrating his sixth great-grandfather.

Though the founding father and third US president was a proponent of individual rights and later denounced the slave trade, he paradoxically owned hundreds of slaves and had at least six children with one of them, Sally Hemings, who was 16 when she became pregnant with their first. Four of their children survived.

Because Hemings was enslaved by Jefferson and nearly 30 years his junior, some modern historians now argue that any sexual relationship between the two should be considered rape or assault.

"He was a brilliant man who preached equality, but he didn't practice it," LaNier told Smithsonian Magazine of Jefferson. "He owned people. And now I'm here because of it."

Once he agreed to the project, however, LaNier refused to wear the wig.

"I didn't want to become Jefferson," he told Smithsonian Magazine. "My ancestor had his dreams — and now it's up to all of us living in America today to make sure no one is excluded from the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

"Somebody who's really engaged with their forebear will be more likely to go the extra mile with the project," the photographer said.

Kenneth Morris, pictured above, helped compile an illustrated biography of his third great-grandfather Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery and became a leader in the abolitionist movement, and founded the Frederick Douglass Family Foundation, which is "focused on the struggle for racial equity and an end to human exploitation."

"Once you start to look at people's past you realize that it wasn't necessarily all rose-covered cottages and that our forebears and many famous people were involved in some very questionable things," he said.

Oliver Cromwell, pictured above with nine times great-grandson Charles Bush, is a hugely controversial figure in British history. While he ruled the country as Lord Protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland after having freed the people from King Charles I's oppression, others see him as a violent dictator who led one of the most brutal military conquests in English history.

Another controversial person featured in Gardner's series is Horatio Nelson, pictured above next to fourth great-grandson William John Raglan Horatio Tribe.

Nelson was one of the most celebrated British naval commanders known for defeating Napoleon, however, he has also been widely criticized and seen as a white supremacist who stood in the way of Britain's abolitionist movement, as Afua Hirsch wrote in a 2017 op-ed for The Guardian which argued that Nelson's column, a monument in London, should be taken down.

"I'm not excusing any of it," Gardner said, speaking of some of the more reprehensible actions of the people he's chosen to feature. "I'm just saying, you know, I think it's important that we have the conversation, and consider people as a whole and not a part."

"More knowledge of our past leads to more understanding between people," he added. "I encourage education into our past, which is something I think has never been more needed than it is right at this moment."

• Read more:
• A photographer finds total strangers who look like they could be twins and the pictures might make you do a double take
• An artist famous for his pictures of naked people in public is now doing nude photo shoots over video chat
• People are hiring a photographer to shoot 'pandemic portraits' through their windows
• Before-and-after photos show the dramatic effect lockdowns are having on pollution around the world
• A couple travels around the world to perfectly re-create movie and TV scenes