PHotos OF men WHO SHARE THE NAMES OF PRESIDENTS BY PATRICK WITTY

*A version of this story originally appeared in The New York Times October 14, 2007.

These are portraits of everyday people who bear the names of American presidents. 

Abraham Lincoln is a master of ceremonies in the Bronx. John F. Kennedy is an accountant on Long Island. Herbert Hoover is an artist in Harlem. Richard Nixon is a retired firefighter in Atlantic City. John Quincy Adams is a preacher in Brooklyn.

George Washington is in prison, serving three years on a weapons conviction.

Some of the presidential doppelgängers I met during this project were named to honor the great men who have occupied the Oval Office; others inherited the name from their fathers. Regardless, living with such a name can be a burden.

“‘Do you have wooden teeth? Did you chop down the cherry tree? Where’s Martha?’” George Washington told me. “To this very day - I’m 47 years old - I still get it.”

He was named for a father he never knew, and grew up on the Lower East Side. This is his fourth prison stint. I asked if it was difficult being a black man named after a president, and how he felt about Barack Obama (this was before he became President.)

“Growing up as a kid,” he said, “I never thought that a black man could become president. Watching him brought tears to my eyes.”

His pose echoes the earliest known image of Washington, painted in 1772 by Charles Willson Peale. For each photograph in this series, there is a reference to a specific historical portrait of the similarly named president, through body language or composition. I chose a cumbersome camera, a large-format Crown Graphic from the 1950s, to pay homage to the tedious process many presidents endured while sitting for portraits before the invention of the photograph.