It wouldn’t make much sense to think of today’s world of technology without artificial intelligence. Hence, taking advantage of the key technology, a photographer, Alper Yesiltas, based in Turkey, has done an amazing job. Under his super cool and exceptional project named “As If Nothing Happened,” Yesiltas designed the portraits of those celebrity stars who departed from the world a long time ago. He has accomplished this horrific yet exciting task with the help of artificial photo enhancer software and a special photo editing program. As a result, he got perfectly designed portraits of Princess Diana, Kurt Cobain, John Lennon, Janis Joplin, Freddie Mercury, and others.
One of the most intriguing things about the project is that Yesiltas focused on those celebrities who died after going through extreme and accidental circumstances. Just like Lady Diana, who got killed in Paris on August 31, 1997, at the age of 36. Similarly, John Lennon, who was a British singer, was killed by a gunshot in 1980 when he was 40 years old. You must know about Queen’s lead vocalist, Freddie Mercury, who died at the age of 45 in 1991 after suffering from AIDS and bronchial pneumonia. Hence, Yesiltas has made a lot of portraits of celebrities like these who have a painful death history.
While writing about the project, Yesiltas said, “With the development of AI technology, I’ve been excited for a while, thinking that “anything imaginable can be shown in reality.” He further stated, “When I started tinkering with technology, I saw what I could do and thought about what would make me the happiest. I wanted to see some of the people I missed again in front of me, and that’s how this project emerged. The hardest part of the creative process for me is making the image feel “real” to me. The moment I like the most is when I think the image in front of me looks very realistic as if it was taken by a photographer.”
As per Yesiltas, the aim behind the project was just to get an idea of how these people would look today if they were alive today. While explaining the project, he said that it’s really exciting that we can transform anything imaginable into reality with the help of artificial intelligence. He stated, “Behind this project lies the question of how people would look photo-realistically if some great event had not happened to them.”