I am just trying to encourage people to be a little bit more curious.

Introduction

It all began when Drew Gardner’s mother commented that he looked a lot like his grandfather. It’s a common enough observation. Someone older sees something in you – a facial feature, a gesture, a way of expressing yourself – and it triggers a memory that reaches across time to connect predecessor and descendant. It can lead one to explore further, to climb down the family tree and look around. And there is always the hope that if one digs deep enough one might unearth a famous forebear… Few do, of course. For the most part such genealogy uncovers a list of names, occupations, relationships, but little to tell who those distant relatives really were, what they were like. But for the few, there is a figure of note, and that changes things, for history provides a fulsome story. A story not just of interest to its inheritor, but to others for whom this is no longer a private narrative but a public one.

In his project ‘Descendants’, Drew Gardner photographs individuals in the pose and style of a painting or photograph of a predecessor. Initially those predecessors were from among the celebrities of yesteryear but, as the series evolved, he discovered more nuanced but no less poignant resonance in the almost forgotten. In the myriad faces of ordinary men and women entombed in archives that seldom see the light of day. And so he set out to discover who they were and make the painstaking climb up through each family tree.

Whether the forebear is famous or forgotten, the results are intriguing because each latter-day portrait hangs somewhere between past and present. In some, the present haunts the past in ways that remind us just how much history is refracted (and often distorted) in the lens of the present. But in other images, there is an uncanny sense of time collapsed, of a fleeting but compelling arc across the centuries as descendant assumes the aura of ancestor. While the former reminds us that the past is a foreign country where they did things differently (to paraphrase L.P. Hartley), the latter confirms that we are all none-the-less its inheritors.

Alasdair Foster

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[Left] Oliver Cromwell (painting by Robert Walker)
[Right] © Drew Gardner – Charles Bush, ninth great grandson of Oliver Cromwell

Interview

You speak often of your passion for history. What is it draws you to this subject?

That’s all down to my mum and dad taking me around historical sites in Britain and in Europe, mainly Britain. When I was a boy, one of the petrol companies was giving away cards you collected and put into a book – it was called Great Britons. It made quite an impression on me. That’s where it all started…

Photography is a relatively new medium. What challenges have you encountered in exploring historical ideas through photographic means.

You raise a very good point there, because reproducing a painting in a photograph is much more challenging that you might think. A painter can put anything they wish into a picture with the stroke of a brush. For a photograph, it all has to be there in front of the camera. About fifteen years ago, I did get briefly into CGI as a way to create backgrounds and so on. But, while they were perhaps my most faithful recreations, they were also the least satisfying. These days I am leaning more toward authenticity, using the painting as a guide in order to reproduce all the elements as accurately as possible.

[Left] Napoleon Bonaparte (painting by Jacques-Louis David)
[Right] © Drew Gardner – Hugo de Salis, third great grandson of Napoleon Bonaparte

In your photographs the sitter is a direct descendant of the person depicted in the original painting, sometimes centuries earlier. How do you go about that kind of detective work? Take for example, the Mona Lisa. There has been so much speculation about who the woman in the portrait actually was…

It all began after a talk I’d given on ‘The Descendants’ when a guy walked up to me in a bar and said he knew one of the descendants of the Mona Lisa. I thought, ha-ha, sure whatever… But a year later I began to wonder if there was anything in it…

I did some research and discovered that, on the back of the painting is written La Gioconda and that Vasari [in his book ‘The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects’ first published in 1550] wrote that Da Vinci had painted a portrait of the silk merchant’s wife Lisa Gherardini. [Gioconda being the feminine form of her married name.] But Vasari had been writing some years after Da Vinci died and his description of the portrait does not always match the painting hanging today in The Louvre. So, this placed a question mark over whether this was indeed Lisa Gherardini, leaving the door open for speculation…

…Until an academic called Armin Schlechter discovered a marginal note in a book of the period held in the Heidelberg University library. In the book Cicero was writing about the importance of art. In the margin, Agostino Vespucci [a Florentine clerk and assistant to Niccolò Machiavelli] had made a note dated October 1503 in which he talks about a painting of Lisa Gherardini that his friend Leonard Da Vinci had begun. This now provided two independent primary sources confirming the sitter’s identity. But what I find interesting is that, even now we have these two irrefutable sources of evidence, the wild speculations keep going.

[Left] Mona Lisa (Lisa Gherardini, painting by Leonardo Da Vinci)
[Right] © Drew Gardner – Princess Irina Strozzi, fifteenth great granddaughter of Lisa Gherardini

How did you trace the family tree to the present day and Irina Strozzi?

Very, very easy, because this is an aristocratic family. So, they have a well-documented family tree. Irina Strozzi knew about the connection, but the family did not like to make a big thing of it.

Your pursuit of authenticity must be particularly critical with a painting as well-known as this. How did you go about it?

Well, it was a long journey. Everything was made from scratch. The clothes and the chair were made in the UK, because that way I had control over the process. Then we drove it all over to the castle in Italy where the background was painted. I self-funded the whole process. It cost tens of thousands of pounds, which I never got back. It was a satisfying but sobering experience for me. I realised I had been very naïve.

[Left] Emeline Pankhurst (photograph by Studio Matzene, Chicago)
[Right] © Drew Gardner – Helen Pankhurst, great granddaughter of Emeline Pankhurst

Do you find that the present-day sitters feel any special affinity to their famous ancestors?

It’s interesting that quite often the sitter is totally disconnected from their forebear. But that wasn’t the case when I photographed Helen Pankhurst, the great granddaughter of the social reformer Emmeline Pankhurst. She was super engaged. As well as leading the women’s suffrage movement in Britain, Emmeline Pankhurst was a vocal Pan-Africanist, and today Helen Pankhurst is very engaged with both women’s rights and the Pan-African movement. When you are working with someone who is so engaged like that, they can really project the sense of their forebear. And that’s special.

I found the Thomas Jefferson recreation with Shannon LaNier fascinating on so many levels. Because, immediately I saw it, I realised there’s a piece of history I didn’t know here…

I am ashamed to say I didn’t either. Everything I learn just reinforces for me how ignorant I am about the histories of People of Colour. And that’s one of the reasons I wanted to make this portrait. Of course, Shannon LaNier knew all about this history.

[Left] Thomas Jefferson (painting by Rembrandt Peale)
[Right] © Drew Gardner – Shannon LaNier, sixth great grandson of Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson had a wife who bore him many children, but when she died, he started a relationship with one of his 121 slaves, Sally Hemings. She was fourteen or fifteen years old when the relationship began – so, a massive age gap. He didn’t marry her, but she bore him two children and Shannon is one of the descendants from that relationship.

Initially, Shannon was very cautious about getting involved in this project. It took a long phone call. Finally, he said that he would sit for the portrait, but he would not wear the wig. He was not whiting up for anyone. From a moral perspective I got it, but I worried that this would weaken the ‘authenticity’ of the image, that it was not going to be as good… How wrong could I be? Because this is probably the most power portrait in the series.

I had previously made a portrait of the social reformer Frederick Douglass, the most important leader of the movement for African American civil rights in the nineteenth century. Even though we got a wig made and the photograph was all spot on with the original, it got no airplay whatsoever. Whereas the image with Shannon LaNier was on CNN and BBC World Service, and all over Twitter. It became a big deal.

Why do you think that was?

It was just so controversial. I was recreating a portrait of a Founding Father of the United States of America with a Person of Colour. And that was quite confronting, I think. Some people were quite unpleasant to me about it.

[Left] Andrew Jackson Smith (unidentified photographer)
[Right] © Drew Gardner – Kwesi Bowman, third great grandson of Andrew Jackson Smith

What prompted you to begin the series of US Civil War tintypes and to focus on African American soldiers?

Working with Shannon put me in touch with a whole community of people who were telling non-white histories. At the same time, what fascinated me about the American Civil War was that it occurred at the dawn of photography. It just felt like this would be a really great thing to do.

It took me three years to research. I started going through photographic collections from the period. It is estimated that there were around four million photographs taken during the American Civil War, yet out of all those we found only 125 Black American Civil War combatants who were named. And of those, we found just twenty-five with living descendants, of which six could participate easily.

Why did you choose to shoot tintypes?

Given my experience with the Mona Lisa project, I had decided to get a photographic company to sponsor me. However, for whatever reason, at the eleventh hour the sponsor pulled out. Everything was planned, everyone ready to go… So, what am I going to do? Well, let me tell you: it may be that the worst thing about undertaking a big project is not having a sponsor – but it is also the best thing, because you’re no longer beholden to anyone. Given this sudden artistic freedom, I decided to use the tintype.

[Left] Lewis Douglass (photograph by Case & Getchell, Boston)
[Right] © Drew Gardner – Austin Morris, third great nephew of Lewis Douglass

I was helped in no small way by a book called ‘The Creative Act: A Way of Being’ by Rick Rubin. He speaks about the authenticity of art. I had never shot a tintype in my life, and it was curiously satisfying and actually quite straight-forward if you are used to taking still photos. All six portraits had to be shot on one day because of the cost. I felt like such a charlatan because I was really rushing things. But then, Sam, the tintype technician I was working with, said no, this is how it would have been done. They would have been pushing whole regiments through – two minutes each person – what we were doing is vaguely authentic.

And the great irony, though I didn’t realise it at the time, was that in losing the sponsor I got to a place I had never been before. In a world of AI where everything is about megapixels and perfection, I found myself running in the opposite direction. I followed my heart and that’s where the treasure lay, although I couldn’t see it until I did it. If I were to offer any advice it would be: don’t be led by the herd; just do what you love, and you might surprise yourself.

How did you go about researching this? I can imagine that with famous and aristocratic people the lineage is relatively well preserved. But it must be much more of a challenge tracing the descendants of rank-and-file soldiers of that period.

Well, you must have the name. But then how do you find their descendants? My colleague Ottawa and I worked with the Black Heritage Unit of WikiTree in the United States. They provided the basic genealogy. What Ottawa then did was to take the last three generations and search for those names on social media, which she cross-referenced to see where there were family connections. She looked for further corroboration in documentation of births, marriages, and deaths and in memorial notices, until finally we could be pretty sure we had identified the right people.

[Left] Richard Oliver (photograph by Joan Miller)
[Right] © Drew Gardner – Jared Miller, third great grandson of Richard Oliver

So, are you introducing them to something they didn’t know?

No, no not at all. With one exception, they all knew. The exception was Neikoye Flowers who portrayed the little drummer boy, David Miles Moore. When I phone Neikoye’s mother, she didn’t know about this historical connection. But when she asked her aunt, she knew but said they didn’t talk about it.

Why?

Being Black and in the Civil War marked you out as a target. The hatred of those who had been on the Confederate side was considerable. Let’s face it… Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was a general and expert cavalry leader on the Confederate side, went on to be a founding member of the Ku Klux Klan.

That said, even though there were no medals issued at the end of the American Civil War, David Miles Moore (the original drummer boy) was so proud of his service he paid to have his own medal made. And that is now in a museum in Massachusetts.

[Left] David Miles Moore (photograph by McPherson & Oliver, Louisiana)
[Right] © Drew Gardner – Neikoye Flowers, fourth great grandson of David Miles Moore

Children change so fast – it seems remarkable that you were able to find a descendant of David Miles Moore who appears around the same age.

It was just luck. There is another drummer-boy picture – more famous – but all of his living descendants are female. And the age difference between David Mills and Neikoye Flowers is actually about four years, but they are roughly the same height and size.

You began making this work twenty years ago. Has the way people view it changed over that time?

People do feel it differently, but it is subject-dependent. To quote Rick Rubin again: “Art without meaning is just decoration. The art is in the idea.” That line changed the way I think about things. With the ‘Mona Lisa’ I had thought people would get really excited, but it was just met with a bit of a shrug. Whereas, with the Civil War tintypes people say: this is a bit edgy – what’s he saying here? What causes the different reactions is the meaning behind the image. With these images, I even get hate mail.

But I am not trying to preach. I am just trying to encourage people to be a little bit more curious.

[Left] Louis Troutman (photograph by Gayford & Speidel, Illinois)
[Right] © Drew Gardner – Christopher Wilson, third great grandson of Louis Troutman

In making ‘The Descendants’, what have you learned about yourself that you did not previously know or understand.

I’ve learned how ignorant I am. It’s really that easy. If you had asked me twenty years ago, I’d have said I knew my history. I had quite an ego about me back then. I’ve always loved history, but the more I read, the more realise how ignorant I am.

People can get a bit affronted when I say that, but I think it’s really important to own it, because we can’t ever know everything. Can’t we just accept that we don’t know stuff?

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His images have garnered many accolades including The International Color Awards Fine Art prize, 2009; the Shanghai Photography Award, 2018; and the American Photography AP37 award, 2021. In 2024, he was named Photographer of the Year at the ND Awards, and Film Photographer of the Year at the International Photography Awards, while also winning the Head On Portrait Prize (Australia), the Fine Art Awards at Prix de la Photographie Paris, and the Open Award from the Association of Photographers (UK). In 2025, he was named Portrait Photographer of the Year at the 48th APA Awards in London. Drew Gardner has a room named after him in the Manfrotto headquarters in Bassano, Italy. He lives and works in Frome in Somerset, England.

Photo: Kristof Ramon

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This interview is a Talking Pictures original.

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