Imagined Images

Imagine Images is a project where I recreate my missing family photo album with the use of AI. My actual family archives were lost due to many relocations of my parents and grandparents, and I used their stories as prompts to visualize our history.

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. I don’t really know much about them, except for some stories I’ve been told about where they lived and what their profession was. I took all these stories and used them as prompts in an image-generating AI to rewrite my own history. Unexpectedly, that process was not only emotional but also informative. 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.

Moments that happened, moments that were unphotographed, moments I imagined, moments I was told about, moments I have hoped to happen, moments that never happened.

How can one rewrite his own history?

………

The project “Imagined Images” focuses exactly on the intersection between the most intimate human photography and AI-generated images while also highlighting the correlation between words and images. It reflects on the popular, amateur, use of photography to document family history and how our perception of self and belonging is formed through those images. The project also touches on the topic of curating practice, since the family photo album is highly curated and therefore a constructed history of the family. Noticing the similarities of the photographs included in family albums made me realize that photographers follow, unconsciously, an unspoken script of what a family album should include. This implied scenario of a normal and happy life is transferred between space and time through images and not through words but can be so imperative that if someone is missing parts of this fixed story he may even feel deficient or inadequate. (For example, I don’t have a single photo of a birthday party in my album, because I never had a party for my birthday, so I felt I needed to create many of them with AI. In this way I have added many images that never actually existed, to fill the gaps in my family history and recreate it in a way that would help me reconcile with my actual story. ) Through the use of image-generating AI this scenario becomes visible again and is used as the text prompt that creates the image. The fact that the faces in the images are unrecognizable due to AI’s early version’s inability for photorealistic results seems to intensify our ability to relate to those uncanny images. They are not mine, yours, or anyone’s, but they belong to all of us. The aura is there. The surface of the image is just a stimulus, It’s a certain point that functions as an anchor to a place and a time, It’s a directory, a path, a link to memories and feelings. We used to say that “an image is worth a thousand words” but today a word can produce infinite image variations, reversing that relationship.