Call Me Timothee: The Timothee Chalamet Look-Alike Competition

The definitive book capturing the mayhem and wonder of the Timothée 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 Timothée 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 Timothées turned up, only to be upstaged by the surprise appearance of the real Timothée 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 Timothées who got to be stars for a day in the galaxy of Timothée 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 Timothée. includes a Q&A with organizer Anthony Po and a rich selection of images documenting the event and capturing the many Timothées of the day. “If the fanaticism of Beatlemania was agented by lust, and contemporary fandom by some combination of irony and whimsy, Call Me Timothée. is 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 doppëlganger 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 Timothées—whimsy, irony, eros. ” — Nick Daoust, The Brooklyn Rail.