I spy with my (digital) eye…

If a picture is worth a thousand words, one can chew on why those wallet loads of photos we carry around with us have not reduced or repealed the burden of bureaucracy in Turkey. One of the more bizarre bits of advice you encounter about living and residing in the country is to stockpile photographs of yourself and have them ready to dole out for any transactions. Photos are required for everything you do and supplement almost every form you fill out, often in triplicate and rising. Native Turks also keep a stack tucked away just in case. The photo laminating man is a fixture at weekly markets and main street strategic points. But official forms still require (in writing) your village, blood lines like your mother's name, father's name. Have foreigners determined whether this means your parents' surname, forename, maiden name or even (gulp!) your Christian name?

At any given time in Turkey, I had wasteful amounts of photos to hand and to wallet. "Oh, I have brought my own photos," I declared when I went to the criminal police screening center for part of the process of applying for Turkish citizenship. "This is the one time you don't need photos, lady; we're taking the shots here," a pen-wielding sergeant snapped. I lined up for mug shots and finger printing with Natasha, who had been soliciting, and some defiant urchins being indexed for minor infractions.

Digital parameters

Posing for official photos has stimulated the output of printed matter telling you, often over four or five pages and giving detailed illustrations and rules, about how to pose for the required snap and, in fine print, that your fee will be forfeited if your image exceeds computer generated digital parameters. Remember those cute, smelly cubicles you used to go into and giggle into the camera and your photos slotted out 10 minutes later still wet around the edges? Out of date thanks to digitalization. Polaroid instant print film? Forget it; they were a short-lived, gooey photo op, out-teched by pocket-sized cameras, mega pixels and print your own photos.

Digitalization reinvented photography and developed a subclass of point-and-shooters without the need for film. But already digital images are becoming unreliable as a piece of identity. Visual rendering means that photographs are easily shopped and cropped, re- or superimposed, recolored or retoned. At the click of a mouse, facial images can be elongated, glamorized, uglified, blown up or retouched. Years and wrinkles can be photo-lifted. To his anger, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan once found his own head digitally impaled on a stubborn four-legged creature.

Passports and driving licenses and, increasingly, other ID documents now disqualify digital or photoshopped images. The subversive trade in ID cards in Turkey is legendary anyway, and most foreign passport offices or Euro driving license centers accept only photos taken by designated shops that adhere to prim image guidelines. Iris scans, once a promising identifying feature, now seem prone to flaws and a worrying number of inaccuracies. The eye of the beholder did not always have 20/20 visualization.

When one has been away from home for a long period, reacquainting yourself with bureaucratic protocol can be weird and bewildering, especially when it comes to having yourself embedded in various bits of identification, driving license, insurance, social security or health cards. Digitalization has not eliminated fraud. On returning to Canada, I found that government or official bodies no longer accepted self-provided photos. Newspapers bannered a Canadian woman, Mrs. Suaad Hagi Mohamud, who spent 86 days in limbo in a Kenyan jail because Canadian officials passed her over to Kenyan security for prosecution as an impostor. She stood accused of not being the spitting image in her passport because her lips did not “match” her photograph. She was exonerated through her son's DNA.

In response to identity theft, Canadian bureaucrats use counter-mounted web cams to take your photo in situ and store it for easy referral with your computer records. You are not allowed to smile. "That was a bit of an upturn of the lips, dear, and you blinked; I'll have to snap you again. Don't move now." The nasty digital factotum staring at me from my driving license looks medicated or feral. It may match my records but stretches the limits of recognition. For health cards, the smile rule is relaxed and you can grin and show a few teeth. But the digital divide can still pose the question, "Have I jumped species? Am I a simulacrum of my digital self?" Digital photography seems to be altering the image it intends to authenticate. To reduce the fly in the digital eye (or lips), is it feasible to take a voyage around oneself and present a 360-degree three dimensional image that lends a hand to digital detectives?

As digitalization threatens to distort and even manipulate our individuality and remap virtual boundaries, the prosaic question “Who am I?” remains worryingly ambiguous and infinite. Recognition and identity promise to generate vigorous debates and full agendas for some time to come. It was with nostalgia that I ditched my vintage collection of print photos from Turkey.