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Images Pictures Photographs & Text
 2024 - ongoing
Two-volume publication
Hand-made dummy-books using soft-cover lay-flat binding and a custom box enclosure 
180 pages in total
 

Images Pictures Photographs & Text is a two-part publication that, through an unlikely selection and sequence of pictures generated using OpenAI’s text-to-image artificial intelligence (AI) model, DALL-E, and a complete history of the exploratory natural language text-prompts that brought them into existence, contemplates the nature of the photograph amidst the ongoing “revolution in media creation” (Manovic, 2023, p.2) brought on by the rise of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies.

The project’s sequence leans into what the ever-narrowing visual differences between the two mediums might mean by consciously playing on the tropes and visual language of Photography through the generated.
The selected generations resemble photographic portraits; vernacular snapshots; documents of banal, scientific, and historical affairs; as well as bizarre, impossible, and picture-esque views of a time bygone—all relating to the privileged position of the camera as a witness and registrar of bygone incidence and an already-present sense of failure within photographic representation.
In turn, the collated text-prompts allow one to follow the journey of intuition into the making of the AI-generated pictures that make up the project, but also reveal a procedural similarity between the acts of photographing and prompting: the fact that prompting, just like photographing, relies on a variable degree of guidance, orchestration and repetition (subject matter, style, lighting, framing etc.) amongst what is otherwise incidental and spontaneous.

In other words, Images Pictures Photographs & Text suggest that despite the AI-generated picture’s nature, as an aggregate of the photographic archive, it can simultaneously present us with its own set of contingent possibilities whilst allowing us to tap into a collective (albeit, incomplete and censored) photographic unconscious of sorts.