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Mady & Monette

Maja Daniels

Mon­ette and Mady are identical twins. They have lived their whole life closely together and are, as they say, insep­ar­able.
I used to see them on the streets of Paris now and then and I was instantly fas­cin­ated by their identical out­fits and syn­chron­ized cor­poral lan­guage. They stood out from any crowd and I couldn’t quite believe my eyes. I remem­ber think­ing that they might not be real. They were quirky and beau­ti­ful and I only ever saw them in passing.
Years later, when I finally approached them I was not sur­prised to dis­cover that they often fin­ish each other’s sen­tences and that they refer to them­selves as « I » instead of « we ».
Mon­ette and Mady do not just share a close rela­tion­ship as sis­ters; they have also made a pro­fes­sion out of their image. As a couple they act, model and dance together and the city of Paris is their main stage. If they ever go out dressed in dif­fer­ent out­fits, people stop and ask why they are arguing. Mady remarks “per­haps it has become even more import­ant for people around us to see us dressed identic­ally than it is for us.”

Neither Mady nor Mon­ette have mar­ried or had chil­dren and they always eat the same kind of food in identical por­tions.
It took me a long time before I approached Mady and Mon­ette. Their pres­ence had been brew­ing in the back of my mind while I was work­ing on a pro­ject on Alzheimer’s dis­ease. That pro­ject made me increas­ingly aware of ques­tions regard­ing aging and the many ste­reo­types that are related to this.
Mady and Mon­ette how­ever seemed com­pletely indif­fer­ent to this in the play­ful way they car­ried them­selves and in the way they stood out from the crowd. They didn’t seem to have an age. After approach­ing them I found out that they have in fact long stopped cel­eb­rat­ing their birth­days and that they defy any pre-conceived notions related to grow­ing old.

Rebecca McCle­l­land on Maja Daniels, Images of intim­acy and iden­tity :
“Two of the most pro­found nuances of being an identical twin are the com­plex nature of iden­tity and intim­acy, the kind of intens­ity of which Maja Daniels cap­tures so well in her series of por­traits of identical twins Mon­ette and Mady. The gentle phys­ical close­ness within the images, their coales­cent bod­ies share a con­stant touch or whis­per a secret word. Their match­ing out­fits betray their ana­log­ous con­di­tion. We know that iden­tity is cre­ated by both nature and nur­ture, genet­ic­ally and envir­on­ment­ally. As humans we believe ourselves to be unique and aspire to gain con­trol of our des­tiny. Our aim is to form deep per­sonal rela­tion­ships and make con­nec­tions bey­ond a sin­gu­lar life. Yet as a twin, these des­tinies are resolved even before birth, you are given a life part­ner the moment you are born.”

This is an ongo­ing project.