Polaroids from the Ottoman Empire

Since early 2022, I have been exploring Midjourney to create photographs of people and scenes that do not, in fact, exist.

These artificially-generated images depict a present-day Ottoman Empire that is part Jodorowsky fever dream, part queer rebellion. They also represent a fascinating exploration on the poetics of photography, as I have to find the words to describe my imagination and photographic expertise to a machine that knows how to emulate both but understands neither. One of my favorite quotes, belonging to Aldous Huxley, describes the taste of champagne as "an apple peeled with a steel knife." That is the kind of poetry that excites me. It is also delightful that our need to communicate with Artificial Intelligences is not pushing us to be coders at all, but rather, poets. So I felt compelled to submit this body of work, as it is a product of my trying to teach an algorithm to imagine a photographic body of work with political subtext that is somehow, hopefully, gracefully auto-orientalist.

These images are an expansion of a world-building experiment I first started with my Forever Sultan series, depicting undead Ottoman soldiers and an accursed Sultan, intended to criticize present-day Middle East politics. The Forever Sultan was a neon sculpture installation in 2017, and a pixel-art love letter to 80s and 90s video games and science fiction in 2018. Now, through Midjourney, I can visualize it photorealistically.

As a photographer who has explored orientalist portraiture in the past, shooting homoerotic scenes in Turkish baths for almost a decade, I was interested in combining my photographic themes with themes I could only envision as coming to life as pixel art.

Rather than presenting these AI-generated images digitally, I have been printing them on Polaroids. The slightly fuzzy texture of Polaroid positives removes the uncanny valley element entirely, turning these moments into believable documentations. The immediacy and personal nature of the medium also brings with it another layer of plausibility by placing me, as a photographer and voyeur, into this narrative, into these imagined and largely queer Ottoman spaces. That Polaroids had not been invented yet by the time the Ottoman Empire collapsed also clues the viewer in on the fictional quality of the documents.

Another layer of these works that excites me is the fact that AI algorithms mine the internet for visuals that are associated with my prompts. As a photographer, that means that the algorithm is also finding and gathering inspiration from documentations of my own work, creating a curious, cyclical component to my practice, sifted through the filter of the web.

Since Jon Rafman's screenshots of Google Street View, we have been exposed to the idea of digital image captures as photography. This has been furthered with the inclusion of Photo Mode in almost every recent video game, allowing the player to reorient the game's perspective camera to determine how the light hits a character. I find it deeply fascinating to be navigating this uncharted terrain, but I do believe that Midjourney creates images that should be considered photography, and I also think that the introduction of the Polaroid deliciously complicates the nature of the images further.