by Michael Curry

The image has moved into a new age and the voices of the past are lining up to knock it down.  AI image generation has entered the collective consciousness with projects such as Deep Dream and Dall-e, harnessing techniques such as the GAN and Stable Diffusion to explore the latent space of images.  These images, seeming to appear out of the ether, have energized critics’ voices and creators’ visions.

 A truly great photographer’s talent lies in their ability to curate images from the real world, framing the chaos of our 3-D existence into a 2-D representation.  The truly great latent space photographer generates images from the chaos of all the previous images that have been captured.  Sifting through the multi-dimensional space of pixel values and human interpretation to construct images living in a zone between dreams and reality.  

Its mysterious nature and the skepticism that surrounds this new art mirrors the rise of photography a century before.  Critics’ minds once again are caught up in discussions of the tool and its technical nature, finding solace in the judgment that art cannot be created from a technique birthed from engineering.  This Luddite view is blinding them to an avalanche coming for all image generators.  The genie cannot be put back in the bottle and the photographer’s eye, trained at curation, is needed to help us navigate this new latent world.

Michael Curry

Master Printer / Colorist
Ed Kashi Studio