Doctor's Double Vision Offers Clear View : Obsessions: Plastic surgeon photographs identical twins, merging medicine, art.

By SHARON COHEN

Dec. 10, 1995 12 AM PT

ASSOCIATED PRESS

CHICAGO — David Teplica’s life story is tailor-made for a split screen. He has two careers, two sets of tools--scalpel and camera--and a singular fascination with a subject that occurs in twos: twins.

Teplica is a plastic surgeon and a photographer, merging the worlds of medicine and art to sculpt and study the human face.

“It’s been a double life, a twin existence from Day 1,” Teplica says with a sly smile, relaxing his lanky frame in his office decorated with his photos and medical and fine arts degrees.

Though one career demands precision and the other creativity, Teplica says his two jobs are “hopelessly fused. One minute I can be talking to a movie producer in L.A. about a twins movie,” he notes, “and the next minute I’m operating on someone’s cancer-ridden lip.”

For seven years, the 36-year-old surgeon has turned his camera lens on identical twins, compiling an unprecedented scientific archive of 5,000 to 6,000 color photos of facial anatomies in a collaborative project with the Center for Study of Multiple Birth, affiliated with Northwestern University.

Teplica also has taken thousands more black-and-white portraits of twins--strikingly dramatic images, some of entwined bodies wrestling, biting or embracing, others of faces, heads, jaws or noses touching one another--all somehow capturing the duality and individuality of identical siblings.

One photo, for instance, is a magnified image of two fingertips that shows the one whorl that distinguishes two brothers in appearance. Another features the back of twins’ shaven heads, each with one disembodied hand seemingly pushing an ear toward the other.

“What I’m trying to do is get across the idea that these people are not only physically identical, but that they’re psychologically meshed in ways that we as single individuals can’t really fathom,” Teplica says.

“Imagine having somebody who seems to understand everything you’re thinking and feeling without your having to explain anything,” he adds. “I’m trying to flesh out some of those issues of intimacy or psychological entanglement or . . . or just the genuine love that exists.”

There may be another, more primal reason for his interest. After he became immersed in the subject, a doctor suggested that Teplica ask his mother whether he was a twin. The answer was a shocker.

“She turned white and said, ‘David, I thought you’d never hear this story,’ ” he recalls.

When she was pregnant, she said, she grew especially large, and her doctor told her she’d be having twins. But in her fourth month, she suffered heavy cramping and bleeding and later delivered just one child--him.

“ ‘Doctor Searches for Dead Twin!’--This is not what I want,” he says, rolling his eyes at the imaginary tabloid headline. “But perhaps there is a longing in me for a half of me that no longer exists.”

“That’s pretty cheesy,” he laughs, “but it’s fascinating.”

Teplica’s photos--his portfolio includes non-twin images--have been featured on postcards and posters, science and art books here and abroad, a banner for a Soviet twins beauty contest, the pages of the New Yorker and the London Guardian, the walls of the Art Institute and the Empire State Building and galleries from Taiwan to Mexico.

He also uses his artistic skills for public service. His photos of child burn victims have been exhibited across the United States as part of his Children’s Burn Awareness Program, to alert parents that they can prevent such accidents.

With his silver hair, reassuring calm voice and navy, gold-buttoned blazer, Teplica looks like he should be sipping cognac and talking polo and tax shelters in the wood-and-leather environs of a private men’s club.

But to hear him tell it, his life path was almost preordained and he knew that his two hands would someday be doing the work of four. The son of an architect and a nurse, Teplica remembers sculpting and building as a toddler and insists that by age 5, he declared he’d be a surgeon.

He picked up a camera first during college. The scalpel came later.

After earning a medical degree from Dartmouth, Teplica became a resident at the University of Chicago but also squeezed in a masters of arts degree from the School of the Art Institute.

There was some cross-pollination: His entrance portfolio featured discarded patient X-rays reassembled into art with a Garden of Eve theme.

He began photographing twins in 1988; the next year he led a team of 11 researchers who huddled under a sweltering circus tent at the Twins Days Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio, taking thousands of pictures of identical brothers and sisters.

These standard medical photographs, Teplica says, will help explore the notion of what makes a face appealing--a topic of obvious interest to a plastic surgeon.

“One twin is almost always considered to be more attractive than the other,” he says. “For the first time, we might have a human model that allows us to evaluate which tiny little changes in the anatomy of the face seem to lead toward a more attractive appearance.”

Teplica says this comprehensive catalog also has scientific significance. He believes his work shows that secondary skin traits--moles, freckles, wrinkles--are genetically predetermined.

In one intriguing case, he says, he discovered that two Texas sisters had developed cancer on their left ears at the same time.

“It’s rather overwhelming to look at this batch of scientific photographs,” he says, “and see how two little 12-year-old girls have their acne erupt at exactly the same spot on the nose at exactly the same time or . . . three or four gray hairs that sprout first on a 45-year-old man are the exact same gray hairs that sprout on his brother.”

Just like the twins he captures on film, Teplica says his two careers mirror one another.

“Plastic surgery is the three-dimensional extension of what I do photographically,” he says. “I’m manipulating the situation . . . just like I might manipulate anatomy in the operating room to change the way society perceives the person.”

Teplica frequently lectures art and medical students across the country about how people are judged by their looks.

“We are cruel, absolutely cruel, as a society when it comes to handling people who have facial disfigurements,” says the surgeon, who has made goodwill trips to the Philippines and Mexico to operate on children with birth defects.

Teplica, whose practice is divided between cosmetic and reconstructive work, also says the public mistakenly thinks plastic surgeons create beauty.

“Most of what I do is make people average,” he says. “In society we feel more comfortable with the norm. The bottom line is, everyone wants to fit in. We all want to feel we’re part of the pack.”

Teplica is now mulling over a possible film project and three book offers. Regardless, he’ll continue his double focus.

“I suppose it’s a lot like Siamese twins, inextricably bound, yet different. . . . The two worlds seem to fit beautifully together,” he says. “It’s one wonderful experience.”