indexical aberration
I
Joan Fontcuberta speaks of photography as a document, that would be its inherent final condition. It wasn't until I read his words that I finally accepted this reality. In my past career as a fashion photographer, it was always clear to me that a photograph is not reality. That only with light I could age or rejuvenate a face. That only with light I could transform a miserable space into a place of desire. And that all those who sought truth in a photograph were naive. However, now I start my reflections with the absolute acceptance of Fontcuberta's premise: photography is, without a doubt, a document. Something real has been there—a place, a person—a moment has been frozen, even in the most artificial fashion photograph; there is reality there, and something is documented. With generative imagery, there is no trace of documentation of anything.
II
It never ceases to amaze me that generative photography has finally sparked a genuine curiosity in me to understand photography, which only deepens my confusion. If AI-powered photography has more to do with painting (or performance) than with photography, why am I suddenly overcome with this need to understand photography? Why do I want to finally understand it after 30 years, if what I'm doing now is not photography?
According to Barthes, three conditions are inherent to a photograph : operator , spectator, and spectrum . I think about the images I create, and I can't recognize any of them. Certainly, there is no operator, no photographer peering through a keyhole, deciding what stays in the frame and what stays out. Although, in a way, I am now making much more holistic decisions and with more meticulous precision than ever before—far more than with the digital Canon camera I used to use, my analog Mamiya medium-format camera from my time at the ICP in New York, or even my grandfather's Olympus with which I photographed my high school friends.
Perhaps the only one who retains their status in this paradigm is the spectator . The receiver in this scheme, would maintain their function quite unchanged —especially if they don't know that what they are seeing never existed. Herein lies a question of honesty (or lack thereof) toward our viewers. The interpretation of an image changes radically if you know that someone or something was there, or if you are aware that the eyes looking at you or the sky surrounding them never existed in the real world. It is fundamental, and empathy is important, to understand that this happens. And that, depending on our interests, honesty —or its absence — will be more convenient.
Finally, Barthes's spectrum brings us back to Fontcuberta's document; with even greater strength. Because the referent as the being of photography, that loving or funereal relationship between the photograph and its referent that Barthes speaks of , and the referent's primordial adherence to its photographic simulacrum, all this explodes before us here. Who is the original referent of the adolescent in the room with the burning bed beside him that I created? I don't know that kid. I never asked him to sit on the bed, to look at me, or to turn slightly toward the window to let the light enter his eyes. The adolescent is a tangle of pixels that the algorithm deduced it should assemble to obey the orders I wrote. But neither those eyes nor that burning bed ever existed. Of Barthes's three basic conditions, only one remains, and yet I feel more than ever the need to understand photography.
III
My own confusion was soon compounded by the confusion of others. The first time I tried to convey the joy I felt about the new project, I was met with the relentless confusion of two good friends whom I told about it: "But you do everything on a computer?" Their predictable question struck me, inexplicably, as completely unexpected, and my level of indignation was such that, once my emotions had subsided, I decided to make a virtue of necessity and take those simple questions and their possible answers as the starting points for the intellectual justification of MOPAH . From the outset, what became clear was that my project grew from a profoundly conceptual foundation, which would require arduous work to render transparent, given how overwhelmingly distracting it is that the final product is a photographic image. Therein lies one of the key aspects of MOPAH and one of its greatest challenges: to make visible that my intention to take the visual rhetoric of the document—light, framing, texture—and empty it of its ontological commitment to a real event it is not only deliberate but constitutes one of the project's main axes. There is an explicit desire to detach myself from the staging. In fashion photography or staged photography, fictions are constructed that reference actual legitimate codes, but they still depend on a real photographic apparatus in front of real objects or bodies—there is a physical staging, therefore, an indexical residue remains (someone, something, was in front of the camera). With generative AI, this residue disappears entirely: there is no prior physical event, not even a simulated one. This is the exact threshold at which I seek to position myself and the categorical leap of MOPAH.
IV
It is in this new space that my work takes the opportunity to move. The generative image becomes a new category of artistic language, which, although it mimics the properties of traditional photography to the point of imposture, I firmly believe it constitutes a whole new autonomous artistic language. Not only because of the loss of its indexical quality of reality, but other new and unique phenomena of the generative image point in that direction, for example, the new entity, of an almost hylomorphic nature, that the concept of authorship assumes.
My work is based on a concept that I call indexical aberration. The final generative image doesn't reference anything real because nothing it depicts has ever existed; even so, formally, it always mimics a hypothetical referent. In our way of reading, it's inconceivable to think of an image as anything other than a vision of something that was there. Even knowing I'm looking at a generative image, my brain will still read it as the capture of a specific real space/time.
I exploit this niche to alter, in a more or less subtle way, the brain's tendency to always read reality into a photograph and to assume the indexical link between reality and the referent as inherent. In my work, the image retains the photographic code (which makes it legible as "proof") without retaining its function (proof of anything). It is precisely there that the aberration becomes productive: it is not a defect of the system, but a deliberate operation on my part —putting a little fire where it shouldn't be, or to defying almost imperceptibly the laws of gravity. It is a narrative of freedom. I am not saying ‘the index has broken and this is a crisis’; I am saying ‘the index no longer compels me’. Therefore, I can compose with the same degree of freedom as a painter before an abstract canvas, but the result is presented with the rhetorical appearance of a document.
Susan Sontag speaks of the autonomy of the sign, noting how photography typically loses its autonomy because it depends on the real referent. My indexical aberration performs the reverse manoeuvre, the AI image recovers the autonomy of the sign because it no longer depends on any real object that was in front of it; but does so while maintaining its indexical appearance. It is, in a way, a photographic sign that again behaves as a pure symbolic sign—free, self-referential—but still disguised with the skin of the index.