In this series, I digitally layer ID card-style portraits collected from various sources to produce new faces. The resulting images do not belong to a single individual; instead, they carry traces of multiple identities, often appearing genderless, deformed, and ambiguous.

The ID photograph historically functions as a tool within modern bureaucratic systems to stabilize, verify, and classify identity. My intervention aims to disrupt that stability. As faces accumulate and layers overlap, individual identity begins to dissolve, leaving behind the outline of a role or a social type. Within these portraits, the phenotype of a civil servant, a soldier, or an anonymous worker sometimes begins to emerge, yet it never fully resolves into a fixed person.

This work is also conceptually connected to the ways contemporary artificial intelligence systems generate images. AI models produce new visuals by statistically combining countless images and faces from large datasets. What I attempt here can be understood as a manual and slower counterpart to that process: instead of algorithmic synthesis, I use layering, distortion, and reconstruction to reveal the accumulation of faces within a single image. In this sense, the series can also be read as an attempt to rethink machine-based image production through human intervention.

Ultimately, these portraits are less about representing specific individuals and more about opening a space to question how identity is constructed. The faces appear both familiar and unfamiliar; institutional yet anonymous. For me, this work is a way of exploring how fragile, constructed, and multiple identity can be.

​

Fatih Karatekin / 2026