The face of tomorrow

What is the face of London, New York, Paris? What does a Londoner, a New Yorker, a Parisian look like?

The Face of Tomorrow is a new series of photgraphs by Istanbul-based photographer Mike Mike that addresses the effects of globalization on identity.

The large metropolises of the world are magnets for migrants from all parts of the planet resulting in new mixtures of peoples. What might a typical inhabitant of this new metropolis look like in one or two hundred years if they were to become more integrated?

In Turkey and particularly in Istanbul, situated as it is at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, you can see how this process has been at work over the last thousand years as waves of humanity from Central Asia, Arabia, Greece and Rome have been absorbed. The resulting population is fairly uniform suggesting that if you could combine all the faces in a city right now you would be looking at the future face of that city.

The Face of Tomorrow attempts to find this face by taking photographs of the current inhabitants and compositing their faces to create a typical face. What we get is a new person – a mix of all the people in that city. A face that doesn’t exist right now, but a face, it seems, of someone quite real – almost familiar.

Visit the Face of Tomorrow website to see the face of cities around the world.

Photographer: Mike Mike
Assistants: Gianmarco Delre, Scott