"LIFE ETC."

Take a careful look at the passport-size photographs "corrected" by photographers using computer programs. It's beyond doubt that there are good examples of them, but lots of these photos don't look like the person they're supposed to. In fact, they look like androids rather than humans. How can anyone accept his/her life as a whole as long as he/she hates the marks that life has left on his/her face?
Though I'm writing these sentences now, I must confess that it was great to get my first corrected photograph. It was nice to get all marks on my face cleaned up. (It's funny that I'm typing such a sentence because deleting them on the computer screen is not actually cleaning them up. They've never disappeared in the real sense.) Though it was hard to be sure that the kid in the photograph was me, I was very eager to equate myself with this guy who had such a clear skin.
But it was impossible for me to accept the results when I saw a photograph of my girlfriend last year. The photographer was so "benign" that anything other than a pale skin color was deleted from her cheeks and nose. I couldn't keep myself from imagining the photographer talking to his co-workers in his shop and erasing anything pink from her cheeks, thinking that he was creating a brand-new rival to the Mona Lisa.
In the photograph, the face had no expression, no meaning. Nothing was alive, because anything that could lead to a meaning was "corrected." Anything that reflected the memories of that face was "corrected." This made me see what was missing from my photograph as well. Any little mark that a person has collected over the course of his/her lifetime is "corrected" by the photographer.
This idea of "correction" can only be that of someone who is ashamed of his/her life. A person who thinks otherwise would be proud of showing off those marks at every opportunity, like someone returning with scars from a battle. A face is the stage where a person's character is viewed. Its lines are clues to past smiles and angers. Each and every little mark is a shadow of an old memory. The colors on your face are the reflections of your feelings: even though these feelings may be bad, they’re better than feeling nothing. If you prefer a photograph without any of these, you're ashamed of being yourself. Photoshop's techniques give us the opportunity to hide our past: the opportunity to glorify our perfectly "modern" fish-memories and our addiction to denying our true selves by creating a robotic face.

orhan@ug.bcc.bilkent.edu.tr