Imagined Images

Imagined Images is a series of Al-generated images I created to reconstruct my family photo album which is missing. Due to numerous relocations of my ancestors, sometimes forcibly and others at will, the photographs that documented their lives were lost.

My great-grandparents, my grandparents, and my parents changed the place of residency many times before I was born. Sometimes forcibly, sometimes at will. The photographs that documented the events of their lives were lost along the way so I decided to feed their stories as prompts to an image-generating AI to recreate my missing family photo album.  While actual photos are used as a means to preserve memories those images are the exact opposite, they are images created by memories.

Unexpectedly, that process was not only emotional but also informative and even therapeutic. The AI seemed to know more than I did about a specific place and time, adding details to images that I wasn’t aware of and that my parents were able to confirm their truthfulness. That unexpected aspect of AI-generated images led me to realize that there is a kind of truth in those images (when the prompt allows for that) that I call a “statistical truth”.  AI-images are derivatives of photographs, an amalgam, an average of billions of other images, yet may that bring them closer to a more universal kind of truth of phenomena? May they be a mirror through which we may look to back on our society?

For this project, I drew inspiration from my own story but the resulting family album is not truly mine, but it could be anybody's in the sense that despite how unique each family's story is, we tend to represent it through very specific frames and moments. Only happy moments, celebrations and milestones make it in the album, while difficulties, struggles, and loss are left unphotographed in an attempt to be forgotten. This amateur type of photography has no clear intention to lie or deceive, the events photographed truly happened, the photos that document them are unedited, but are those archives telling all the truth?

In a time when war conflicts, refugee flows and right-wing ideology are on the rise I couldn't help but wonder what would it mean for one to be able to rewrite his own life story through images that might soon be indistinguishable from real photos.