When I said working with AI images feels similar to working with photography, the person I was speaking with looked at me sceptically. However, I could see they accepted my rationalisation in the end (perhaps a little reluctantly), and I wanted to discuss that here. I am not, under any circumstances, undermining the time and effort it takes to gain the skills and experience to read and manipulate light. That took me a long time and a lot of effort, and I’m still learning after ten years of concentrated photography practice. But working with photography is not just about light or composition, is it? Perhaps, it’s not even the main thing – however, many might strike me down for saying such a thing!
I recall going to see Hannah Höch at the Whitechapel in 2014. I think it was the first study visit I signed up for with the online university I was with, and was nervous about meeting other students. Being online, those visits were precious and important moments, not only to see art in person, but also for meeting peers. I attended because I thought I ought to, rather than because I had any burning desire to see Höch’s work. I had read the blurb and saw the word ‘collage’, and think I dismissed it as something a bit silly. Really – it seems I knew very little about art or even photography! I wrote about my visit here, expressing surprise and utter enjoyment, and linking the work to theatrical history, recalling my A-level Theatre Studies (I was in my early 40s by then).
Eventually, although not straight away, I started cutting up images too, both moving and still, and playing with collage-like strategies. While creating why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers/ I deliberately set out to create collage that wasn’t cut up with scissors to fit specific lines, but instead, the images were merely layered (demonstrated here).
I see AI-generated images as another step in the evolution of mechanical-image creation and related strategies such as collage. In fact, AI seems like collage too – we just don’t see the cutouts. Like in Sherrie Levine’s work, where the collage is the artist rather than the picture. Nearly everything Benjamin (1988) says about photography in his famous and much quoted essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, published originally in 1936, can be applied to AI-generated images. Even if we might now argue with Benjamin about the loss of aura, it’s an interesting exercise to read the essay and think about AI as you do. AI is another form of mechanical production that we humans will draw on to create image-driven narratives. Of course, there is a lot more to say. And one could zoom into various nuances of difference here and there. Perhaps another time.
However, for now, I have worked with AI images over the last year, as I would with photographic images. They emerge from my tinkering with tools and often reveal the unconscious workings of my psyche, just as photographs can and often do. I make many images and then have to edit and sequence, doing away with favourites in a sequence as they might not fit. I position them in ways that I hope triggers some kind of response in a viewer. Sometimes I take them into collage too, and again, this feels no different from working with found or archival images or ripped up books, which I might practice with glue, a knife and healing board or in Photoshop.
Work in progress – Ingested (2023). Currently, I am not sure if I will stick with a collage strategy here and may simply use the AI images in the final sequence as I would when creating a series of photographs.
I am sure there are many who might say that I’m quite wrong! But for me, AI is just another source, one of several image-based language materials I enjoy working with. Obviously, if one continues to be caught up in the Cartesian fetishisation of light, then my argument will likely make no sense to you – but that too is probably for a future discussion.
Refs:
Benjamin, Walter. 1998. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936). Translated by Harry Zohn. UCLA School of Theatre, Film and Television.
Field SJ, (2014) Gallery Visit Whitechapel Hannah Hoch [blog]. Available at: http://sjf-oca.blogspot.com/2014/03/font-face-font-family-font-face-font.html (Accessed 18/05/2023)
Hannah Höch (2014-5) At: https://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/hannah-hoch/ (Accessed 18/05/2023).