Who’s afraid of artificial intelligence? Probably all of us are a little – but the artists at the centre of this year’s Photo Brussels festival have embraced the technology to bring us an intriguing and, at times, optimistic exploration of one of the most concerning developments of our time.
The ambitious curation by the photography academic Michel Poivert gathers together 17 projects at Brussels’ Hangar gallery. Together their creations reveal the visual and intellectual potential, along with the current limits, of this wave of “promptography”.
Cherry Airlines
Pascal Sgro invites us to step inside an imaginary world onboard his fictional Cherry Airlines, taking an unsettling journey back to the 1950s. Each image, created using AI, blurs the boundaries between reality and invention and suggests glossy ads for a golden age of air travel. Sgro prompts reflection on progress and aspiration, and the paradox of the environmental cost of lifestyle.
Serving up a fantasy lunch and a comfortable nap in the plush cabin, he tells the story of the pursuit of luxury that has fuelled the climate crisis.
Une Histoire Parallele
In their series Une Histoire Parallele, the artists Brodbeck and de Barbuat took a deep dive into the image data banks of Midjourney, an AI programme that creates images from text descriptions. Using the software’s literal language prompts, they wanted to see how they could recreate some of the world’s most famous photographs. The work was made between 2022 and 2023 and really highlighted the flaws and prejudices in source data, questioning the role of the internet in appropriation and stereotyping.
For example, facial features take on a generic form with only a hint of ethnicity – at the time, there were inadequate source images of people of ethnic minority. In the AI-generated recreation of Annie Leibovitz’s iconic portrait of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the data results repeatedly showed Lennon clothed, despite prompts that he should be naked. Not so with Ono – the AI process kept reversing the request, presuming that it is more usual for women to be naked.
The subject of Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother appears to have had some cosmetic work done, the result of Midjourney’s advertising bias. Each of these images presents a sense of confusion between what we recognise and the flaws in the detail – the hands for example.
Bárbaras
Honouring the unsung women who have played a significant part in shaping the Brazil we know today was the mission of the artist Claudia Jaguaribe. So little was known about her primary subject, Bárbara de Alencar, whose name crops up on street signs and the occasional building, that Jaguaribe delved into AI-driven historical, iconographic and photographic research to visualise her story. During her research, she discovered that de Alencar – a business woman, an educator and a revolutionary – was in fact one of her ancestors.
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From the series Bárbaras, 2024, an AI portrait of Espercanca Garcia, who was an enslaved Afro-Brazilian, born in 1751, and is considered the first female lawyer in Brazil
Jaguaribe used AI to create an informed series of portraits of other unrecognised women of significance, entitled Bárbaras, which she has represented through collage as stamps and postcards.
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Another in the series is Aqualtune, an AI portrait of a warrior princess from what was known in her time as Kongo who, during her enslavement in Brazil, was branded on her chest with a flower design made by a hot iron. She fought for her freedom and that of others during the mid-17th century
Silent Hero
Using AI to fill in gaps in historical reference also powers the project by Alexey Yurenev to answer questions about the role his Russian grandfather played in the Red Army during the second world war. His grandfather, he knew, was considered a war hero but as he was no longer alive, Yurenev couldn’t question him as to what part, exactly, he had played.
Yurenev came up with a method to use image data sources to create machine-generated amalgamations of people, places and events that he then presented to surviving war veterans.
These impressionistic images tapped into a psychological narrative that refreshed the veterans’ interpretations of conflict. Their response was remarkable and prompted fascinating historical testimonies.
New New York
Marrying nostalgia with AI technology gives rise to this series created by Robin Lopvet that revisits the history of photography in New York during the 20th century. From reportage to street photography, his computer-generated reflections play, often with humour, on techniques in colour printing and aesthetic that defined an era.
The question he seems to be asking is: Can photography only literally describe the world? Or can we use imagination and fiction, like cinematic creations, to explain it?
For those who prefer a more traditional approach and like to enjoy some pure photography, Photo Brussels is not short of treasure.
At the galleries participating throughout the city you can feast your eyes, for example, on the vintage prints of the Japanese photographer Eikoh Hosoe. On display at Galerie Eric Mouchet is his emblematic series Ordeal by Roses, which was dedicated to the novelist Yukio Mishima. Born in 1933, Hosoe rose to international fame as an avant garde artist during the 60s and died just a few months ago. His work pays homage to his love of European Renaissance painting and the art of eroticism.
Timeless Napoli
Nestled into gallery Stieglitz 19 are fragments of life in Napoli by the photographer Anders Petersen. His edgy, intensely cropped black and white prints don’t try to make sense of the chaos of the city but they tell it how it is, bursting with character and atmosphere. The images have such a classic, timeless quality that it comes as a surprise to find that he made them as recently as 2022.
Wolf
In contrast with the claustrophobia of Naples, you can almost taste the mountain air of the European wilderness at Nationale 8 Gallery. In a departure from his roots in reportage and an urban life, Frederik Buyckx took a fine art approach to his project Wolf and went on an adventure to reconnect with the natural world.
In reaching some of Europe’s most challenging environments I wanted to see what it’s like to have to put up with the force of nature, to show its beauty but at the same time the harshness of coping with it
Photo Brussels runs until 23 February at venues across Brussels, Belgium. Fiona Shields was there at the invitation of the festival organisers.
