Introduction

In December of 2024, with the year going dark, I sat down to ask a machine for faces. Not gods, not trees, not the dead — faces, more or less. This book is what came after.

The faces would not stay faces. A brow would open at the temple and a small winter tree would grow out of the gap where a thought should be; a skull would surface under a cheek like something rising through water, and then sink again. I would set out for a portrait and arrive at a totem, a drowned woman, a tree standing in the fog with its arms open. After a while I stopped fighting it, and began to arrange the images that refused to let me look away. What I was arranging, I understood, was not a folder of pictures. It was a pantheon. A private one: its own gods and saints and ancestors, its own dead.

Three things kept happening. The first is metamorphosis: nothing here is only one thing; everything is caught mid-change between the human and the tree, the body and the corpse, the carved idol and the god. The second is the couple — two faces leaning until they are nearly one; love as fusion, and love as its loss. The third is colour. Most of these begin in grey — ash, bone, bark, winter — and then, in some, colour comes up through the grey like something that has been waiting under the floor. I have come to think of the colour as the soul: not a decoration laid over dead matter, but the dead matter finally admitting what was always inside it. There is an old idea — Dylan Thomas reached for it once — that the same force drives the flower upward and drives it to its ruin, that the green and the dying are a single current. That is the current I kept finding.

I have come to call the larger project Exposures, after the word it kept returning to. I mean exposure in more than one direction at once: of paper and eye to light, where every image begins; of a self to whatever changes it; of the mind to something it has genuinely not seen before. This is the first book in that series. Its name, Anima, is the inner self — yes — but also the older word underneath it, anima mundi, the world-soul the old animists believed moved in stone and tree and weather as much as in us. That is the right word for a book in which nothing is ever only matter.

These are not photographs. Every image was generated in Midjourney and then worked, sometimes heavily, in Photoshop, from prompts I wrote over December of 2024. Their look — the wool and the scratch, the cracked tintype surface — is a deliberate homage to early GAN art, whose first half-formed machine pictures are the ancestors of this aesthetic. I made the book with Claude, an AI, beside me. I disclose it for the same reason I disclose the rest: the made-ness is not a flaw to be concealed. It is the subject. A machine trained on ten thousand human faces, dreaming the human back to us as gods and trees and the dead — that strangeness is the book. To hide how it was made would be to throw away the only thing that makes it worth looking at.

A few of these images carry old names — Orpheus, Iris, a Golem, a Vanitas. You do not need to recognise any of them. The names are doors, not labels; if one opens for you, take it as a small gift, and if it stays shut, the image was built to reach you anyway. Move through the book the way you would move through a dream you only half remember, or a liturgy in a language you do not speak but somehow follow to the end. It begins in grey — the dead matter, the carved faces, the bare winter wood — and it ends in colour, because that turned out to be the only honest order. The soul, if that is what the colour is, arrives last, and all at once.

I will not pretend I fully understand what I made. I only know it would not let me look away… and gönül ister ki — one would wish — it does the same for you.

— Hulki Okan Tabak