May Be An Image Of...

"All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability".

"May Be an Image Of..." is an AI-generated photographic project that explores identity, proximity and cultural homogenisation in contemporary Europe.

The title draws from the language of online image metadata, where captions often read “may be an image of…”, a formulation that does not assert but suspends meaning. This conditional mode marks a crucial distance from photography as indexical trace of the real. It is no longer “that has been”, as Roland Barthes writes, but “may be”, a field of possibility, doubt and construction. It is within this shift that the project operates.

The series portrays fictional teenagers and young adults from different European cities, adopting the visual language of documentary photography while questioning the relationship between image, truth, memory and testimony. Although each subject is theoretically rooted in a different country, they all seem to emerge from the same globalised landscape. Faces, interiors, gestures and emotional codes repeat across borders. What remains distinct are only residual fragments, a name, a language, traces of inherited traditions and local memory.

“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.”
 (Susan Sontag)

The project engages with Susan Sontag’s idea that every photograph is a memento mori, a trace of mortality, vulnerability and irreversible time. Yet here the image no longer preserves what has been lived. It generates what has never existed. In this case "Photography" ceases to function as testimony and becomes simulation, a surface where presence is constructed but never occurred.

“Il prossimo rimane lo straniero.”
(Massimo Cacciari, L'Arcipelago - Adelphi, 1997)

Within this shift, the work reflects on Europe as an unstable archipelago. As Cacciari suggests, proximity never coincides with identity. What is closest remains foreign. In the same way, the identities portrayed in the project appear near and at the same time unreachable, similar yet never fully overlapping.

Through AI-generated imagery and a cinematic visual construction, "May Be an Image Of..." imagines a generation suspended between belonging and disappearance, in a continent increasingly shaped by synthetic images, digital standardisation and the persistent possibility of conflict. What emerges is not a documentary archive but the aesthetic of one, a series of lives that feel familiar precisely because they have never been real.