Avid Bored Panda readers might remember the name Drew Gardner. The award-winning British photographer, who has spent nearly two decades tracking down descendants of notable people and asking them to pose for recreated portraits of their famous ancestors, was already featured on our website.
But at a certain point, he noticed that a big part of his subjects were white men. In 2020, Smithsonian Magazine commissioned a U.S. installment of Gardner’s project, featuring descendants of Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as well as a black descendant of Thomas Jefferson.
Since the white Englishman was aware of his own connection to the United States’ origins — his country abducted about three million Africans, chained and forcibly transported them across the Atlantic — he started wondering about the descendants of these enslaved people and how he could help bring their stories to light.
