They Don't Look Like Me is a series by Niccolò Rastrelli, begun in 2022 across Italy, Kenya, and Japan, portraying cosplayers at home with parents and relatives to examine how fictional personas coexist with family life.
Moving from Milan, Lucca, and Pisa to Nairobi, Mombasa, and Thika, Rastrelli treats cosplay as a global practice shaped by local conditions as much as by shared pop-cultural references. The project repeatedly returns to a central tension between social identity and individual identity: the family home, parents, and routines stand for inherited roles, while costumes and character choices signal self-authored possibilities. At the same time, the pictures complicate easy narratives of generational conflict by recording forms of practical support, from parents who help build costumes to relatives who simply agree to participate in the portrait.
That push-and-pull is made legible through a consistent visual grammar. The photographs are posed group portraits in vibrant color, usually placing the costumed subject in a staged "character" stance while family members hold everyday postures on sofas, by kitchen counters, or in bedrooms and bathrooms. Domestic furnishings—curtains, tiled floors, framed photos—stay fully present, so the costumes read not as escapist elsewhere but as something that inhabits the same space as ordinary objects and habits. Across chapters, the mix of saturated costume hues against quieter interior tones sharpens the contrast between invented worlds and lived ones.
Rastrelli’s method blends a structured portrait session with light ethnography. He brings studio flash lighting into homes to render makeup, embossing, fabrics, and props with crisp definition, and he typically spends two to three hours on site, combining the shoot with a short interview. Those conversations feed the captions, which connect a subject’s day-to-day life to the character they perform. For exhibition contexts, the work has been printed at large scale (around one meter high), allowing viewers to read details in both costume construction and domestic setting.
The series has circulated widely within photography and festival contexts, including presentations at Cortona On The Move (2024) and Lucca Comics & Games (2024), and it was recognized internationally as a finalist for the 2025 Sony World Photography Awards and as a Juror’s Pick in the 2025 LensCulture Portrait Awards.
