The definitive book capturing the mayhem and wonder of the Timothee Chalamet look-alike competition in New York City
On October 27th 2024, Anthony Po (Cheeseball Man), the mastermind of whimsical public events attended on a massive scale, organized a Timothee Chalamet look-alike competition in NYC's Washington Square Park, which he'd advertised weeks prior via anonymous, mysterious fliers posted around the city. Hundreds of spectators and a bevy of prospective Timothees turned up, only to be upstaged by the surprise appearance of the real Timothee Chalamet.
After the NYPD shut down the event and issued a summons and fine to photographer Jonathan Hollingsworth for setting up a shoot without a permit, he turned to his Polaroid camera as backup, producing fleeting, anonymous, and dreamlike portraits of the Timothees who got to be stars for a day in the galaxy of Timothee Chalamet.
The competition was more than just a well-attended curiosity in the park, but a definitive moment that captured the zeitgeist, treated as a major media event.
Call Me Timothee includes a Q&A with organizer Anthony Po and a rich selection of images documenting the event and capturing the many Timothees of the day.
"If the fanaticism of Beatlemania was agented by lust, and contemporary fandom by some combination of irony and whimsy, Call Me Timotheeis in limbo between analog and internet. Where the dreamily low resolution of each portrait evokes a bygone golden-age of heartthrobs, the mimeticism of each attendee's Timmy drag sobers the nostalgic impulse. This is the anachronistic clash between subject and medium that Hollingsworth emphasizes by repetition. Each portrait, much like each portrait's sitter, is a doppelganger of the last; just as Hollingsworth oscillates between digital and instant film formats, so too must readers negotiate the prevailing lenses with which they approach these Timothees-whimsy, irony, eros." - Nick Daoust,The Brooklyn Rail
