Photographer Hunts for Random Couples Who Are Dressed Alike

Dutch photographer George Maas has been working on a series called “Rummy Couples,” which features photos of random couples spotted on the street who are dressed alike — a fashion faux pas. Over the past 5 years, Maas has managed to capture 70 such photographs.

Maas tells us the project started out half a decade ago when he began to notice similarly-dressed lovers walking around on the street. He decided to snap some pictures then, but over the years it became a more serious effort and a more sizable collection of images.

His project has received a good amount of attention over in Europe. He was featured in a Dutch newspaper, invited onto a television program and radio shows, and hired by a Belgian newspaper for a day to hunt for Rummy Couples on the streets of Belgium (he found one matching couple over 7 hours).

He tells us,

I ask them why they are dressed alike. I get all kind of stories from different couples. For me that’s interesting because it makes street photography more connected to the people which are actually photographed and takes them out of their anonymity. You can name it “conceptual documentary street photography.” But actually it reveals an interesting psychological relationship between these people who are dressed alike which nobody explored before. They have been there for years but no photographer took the effort to document this phononama or ask the simple question: “Why?”

I decided to make a book about Rummy Couples. That’s why I do not publish any interview on my web site.

You can find more photographs from this series over on this website. Maas is also planning to publish a book with these photographs.


Image credits: Photographs by George Maas and used with permission

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