Still Life from the Shadows

“Still Life from the Shadows” is a series of surrealistic images. Although the still lifes in the pictures look realistic, their shapes are derived only from the shadows of real photographs and are generated by artificial intelligence technology.

Back in the modernist period, artists represented by Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy experimented with camera-less photography in the darkroom. They exposed real objects directly on photographic paper, resulting in final photographs that only show the light and shadow of the object. I continue the tradition of camera-less photography by utilizing the shadow data from photograms to transform the shadows in the photographs into objects again. In other words, these virtual objects emerge from the world of shadows, attempting to restore the objects to which the shadows originally referred, which seem real but are not.

On the first page of On Photography, Susan Sontag quotes Plato's cave allegory to interrogate photography's pact with reality. If photography is a carnival of shadows, AI images are shadows of Shadow—derivative entities feeding on the big data of pre-existing illusions. These simulacra aspire not only to materialize as authentic objects within the system that reduces reality to data but also to be granted an autonomous vitality—a paradoxical rebirth from the algorithmic womb that first conceived them as shadows.

Despite the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, whether it belongs in photography remains inconclusive. However, the relationship between artificial intelligence and photography is undoubtedly in a state of transition. The new image is interwoven with truth and falsehood, existence and nothingness, temptation and trap, destruction and recombination—seemingly opposing elements. It evokes “Still Life from the Shadows” while resonating with the eternal theme of still life painting, a genre that has persisted throughout art history.