Call Me Timothée: The Timothée 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.

Jonathan Hollingsworth is a New York City-based writer and photographer whose work has been published in The New York Times, The Independent, The Sunday Times Magazine (London), BBC News Magazine, Die Welt and Photo District News, among others. He is the editor of FLACO: The Owl Who Escaped Captivity and Won the Hearts of the World, and the author of the Left Behind: Life and Death Along the U.S. Border and What We Think Now: Young People’s Response to the War in Iraq. He has had solo exhibitions at the UCR / California Museum of Photography, Santa Fe Art Institute, and Center for Photography at Woodstock.