Last August, in a somewhat strange rite of summer, thousands of people accompanied by thousands of lookalikes invaded a small Ohio community.
It was the 15th annual National Twins Festival, a three-day celebration of twinhood in Twinsburg (where else?), a small city southeast of Cleveland. Last year, amid the usual twin-judging contests, fireworks and parade, something a bit different occurred.
In a large circus tent, a team of 11 researchers had set up a camera and spotlights. Over the course of the festival, they would march as many sets of identical twins as they could schedule in front of their camera`s lenses, then painstakingly photograph their faces from many angles. It was all for the sake of science. And art. And one man`s fixation with twins.
The team`s leader was Dr. David Teplica (it rhymes with replica), a plastic and reconstructive surgical resident at the University of Chicago Medical Center. Teplica isn`t the typical young physician eager to join a surgical practice and snag his share of referrals.
Instead, he took a two-year break from his formal medical training to pursue, of all things, a master of fine arts degree in photography. He is now completing a graduate program at the School of the Art Institute.
Teplica, who turns 31 this month, is using science, art and twins to explore the mystery of facial beauty.
The main idea is to photograph the facial anatomies of numerous twins using standardized medical photography techniques, then study the photos to note the physical differences between members in each pair of geminis.
Observing and measuring those dissimilarities that make one twin aesthetically more attractive than the other might lead to a definitive knowledge of human beauty. This would prove especially helpful to plastic surgeons.
What makes this so desirable is that beauty has never been well understood, although most people think they know it when they see it.
For centuries, thinkers have tried to puzzle out the combination of features that makes one person beautiful and another ugly.
”During the Renaissance, Leonardo Da Vinci and Albrecht Durer worked on canons of human proportion to try and answer the question: `What`s beautiful?` ” Teplica said as he sat in his naturally bright artist`s studio off North Michigan Avenue. Above him and a visitor, suspended by thin cords from the high ceiling, was a human skeleton in a flying pose wearing spike heels.
”To some extent, these canons were still being relied on until fairly recently. But we now know they`re not true,” said Teplica, who grew up in Pennsylvania and has one of those handsome, well-bred, ”Tennis anyone?”
faces. ”Da Vinci divided the face (laterally) into three parts and felt that the most beautiful faces could be divided equally,” he said.
But in the late 1980s, Teplica said, Toronto researchers Leslie Farkas and John Kolar ”looked at the most beautiful people they could find and concluded that those faces didn`t even come close to Da Vinci`s
specifications.
”I`m hoping to find clues to what makes someone beautiful based not on speculation but on real life, using twins as a basis.”
Sculpting living tissue
Of all medicine`s disciplines, plastic surgery perhaps comes nearest to art. Ideally, it`s the sculpting not of a lump of clay, stone or metal but of living tissue-skin, muscle and bone-into something with a higher aesthetic appeal.
Like artists, there are surgeons with a real knack for their chosen field, a gift. But then there are those lesser practitioners. While a bad artist creates inferior art, the less-skilled plastic surgeon can create a tragedy.
Thus in a paper published in 1987 in the journal Clinics of Plastic Surgery, Farkas and Kolar said that numeric guidelines on facial proportions, based on precise, computerized measurements ”are urgently needed for those with less experience or talent.”
Just so, Teplica said. He hopes to contribute to such a guide. ”What we do is rebuild people after cancer, accidents, birth defects or burns,” he said. ”To do it well takes a sense of aesthetics, proportion and symmetry, just as in art. Because there`s a lack of hard information about what makes someone attractive, (plastic surgery) is often eye-balled. We`ll adjust and fiddle. I better be careful, I don`t want to give the impression we`re not precise.
”Let`s put it this way: Any information we can generate might allow us to rebuild people better,” said Teplica, who plans eventually to teach at a university where he can get appointments in both the medicine and art departments.
Through the twins study, Teplica also hopes to reach some conclusions about the effects of nature versus those of nurture-genetic makeup compared with such factors as diet and exercise, as well as environment and geography, on the physiognomies of twins and, by extension, others.
”Identical twins are perfect for this since they`re genetically controlled,” he said. In lay terms, the twins develop from a single fertilized ovum that splits to form two embryos with identical genetic makeup. So changes in a twin that don`t occur in the partner can be readily spotted.
Experts think Teplica is headed in the right direction.
”Tremendous. It`s probably important work in terms of building our knowledge of twins,” said Nancy L. Segal, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota who has studied twins extensively and writes a column on the latest scientific research for Twins, a magazine for twins and their families. ”If it can also give plastic surgeons a baseline to measure everyone else against, I think it will be quite marvelous.”
Referring to a preliminary finding of Teplica`s, Dr. Thomas J. Krizek, professor and chairman of the department of surgery at the University of Chicago Medical Center, said: ”The appearance of a mole of the same size and in the same location on a pair of twins tells you that mole was predisposed to be there from the very first cell division. This is fascinating.”
Such excitement has caused Eastman Kodak Co. and the Chicago-based Center for the Study of Multiple Births to provide Teplica`s project with financial aid and other assistance.
”It`s exactly the kind of photo project we love to support,” said Sally Robson, Eastman Kodak`s coordinator for science imaging. ”He`s contributing to history, is what it amounts to.”
A different approach
Teplica has photographed identical twins since he took up photography while in medical school at Dartmouth University. One artful photo of twin sisters has graced posters here and in the Soviet Union. His approach to twins differs dramatically from that of Diane Arbus, the photographer of the bizarre.
”She made them stand out as freaks,” Teplica said. ”I don`t think she meant to be cruel, but she placed them among dwarfs and sideshow acts. I try to show that they`re part of us. They may appear to be the same or to share almost one psychology. But they`re individuals who should be treated as such. They`re just twin individuals.”
Teplica isn`t sure why he`s so drawn to identical twins, although he has some suspicions. At another doctor`s urging, Teplica asked his mother if something involving twins might have occurred in the family`s past.
”She turned bright white and said, `David, I never thought you`d hear this,` ” he said. Then she told him that in the fourth month of her pregnancy with him, heavy bleeding occurred with the loss of some tissue that her doctor believed was probably Teplica`s twin. ”I know it sounds like voodoo. Who really knows?” Teplica said.
It was Dr. Louis Keith, president of the multiple birth study center and an obstetrics and gynecology professor at Northwestern University`s medical school, who suggested Teplica take his camera to Twinsburg. ”It was a wonderful opportunity for him to use his photographic talents to do something that had never been done before,” said Keith, an identical twin whom Teplica photographed with his brother.
In Twinsburg, the team of researchers suffered rain, tornado warnings, mosquitoes and strong winds whipping through the tent where they gathered medical histories and took photos. In the time available, they managed to photograph 100 sets of twins, processing them through in a way to make it harder for the subjects to pull that favorite practical joke of identical twins-the switch. There was no shortage of candidates; many of the 2,800 sets of twins, identical down to their clothing, clamored to have their pictures taken, Teplica said.
Teplica`s team used one camera for all of the detailed closeups, a camera bolted down to prevent movement, as was the chair each twin took turns in.
(Each subject`s left profile was photographed. Teplica later flopped and mounted the photos so that the twins face each other.)
”We wanted to make sure everything was as standardized as possible,”
Teplica said. To that end, Kodak provided film all from the same batch so there would be no variation in color or detail.
Once, so much rainwater streamed through the tent the team had to put its lights and other secondary cameras on stilts. There were other challenges.
”There was a sexual advance,” Teplica said.
”What? Was it from a pair of twins?” a questioner asked.
”No, I really shouldn`t say anything more about that. It`s really National Enquirer stuff,” he said.
Once back from Twinsburg, Teplica`s group began analyzing the photos of 86 sets of twins, digitizing the facial features with computers, a process that continues. His team amassed 4,500 photos of twins, only a few of which were put on display recently in a warehouse space at 1250 W. Van Buren St. as part of an Art Institute student exhibit that runs through April 18.
Teplica said he expects to publish the results of his team`s work in a medical journal. An early unexpected result of his photographic study was his diagnosis of a basal cell skin cancer on the left ear of a middle-age Texas woman who posed in Twinsburg. He has called to urge her to seek treatment.
Next, Teplica said, he hopes to take photos in Nigeria, where members of the Yoruba tribe have twice the rate of twin births as the rest of the world. (In the U.S. the traditional rate of twinning is one in 89 births, said Dr. Keith, who added that the U.S. rate is increasing. The U.S. rate for identical twins has been put at four in 1,000 births.)
”With the Yoruba,” Teplica said, ”there`s a tradition that if a twin dies, a statue is created of the dead twin, and the mother has to feed and clothe it if the other twin is to remain healthy. Yes, I`m hoping to go to Africa.”
