[2025] A Man Spilled His Coffee and Blamed the Collapse of the West
[2023] Eyes Dazzle As They Search for The Truth
[2023] Ashes and Snow
August 2026:
Photobook, Eyes Dazzle as They Search for the Truth
Feburary 10 – May 25, 2026
Community, Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, Germany
December 1 – December 7, 2025
Solo Exhibition, Fonderia 20.9, Verona, Italy
November 24, 2025
Reviewer, Photoworks Portfolio Surgeries
November 20, 2025
Essay, No Country for Old Men, Photowork Annual #32
August 29 – November 9, 2025
Documents, Fotografisk Center, Copenhagen, Denmark
Photoworks Annual 32
2025
It is hard to predict what photography will look like in 30 years, especially when I have yet to experience three decades of life. I was born when the world was on the brink of the digital revolution and leaving behind the analogue age. I remember reading my father’s analogue camera manual while I took photographs on his cellphone, a strange mix of past and future in my hands. At 16, I used a Cybershot camera to macro the mundane beauty of flowers in our garden, or an insect clinging to a window – small, simple moments. A couple of years later, when I entered my BA in photography, the programme was designed to use film cameras for the first two years, transitioning to digital in the latter half. The constant back–and–forth between digital and analogue left me disoriented. Then, while I was questioning whether we had truly left the world of mechanical tools behind, the world introduced a new way of creating images through artificial intelligence image generators.
What will the future look like? In the world of photography, this question may sound obsolete. However, with the emergence of AI, the question has resurfaced in a different form. Some have enthusiastically boarded the fast-moving AI train, embarking on new experiments and generating optimised results. The pace of this optimisation has accelerated so rapidly that even the creators struggle to keep up. Unlike in photography, where for instance, faster and more portable cameras led to capturing instantaneous images or the concept of the “decisive moment”, the rapid evolution of this new medium moves at such an unusual pace that its historical narrative will no longer follow a linear trajectory.
When any tool can effortlessly create something that would have been considered a masterpiece in the previous century, what kind of art will we make? How will we define “value” in a piece of art? A simple answer might involve measuring the time, skill, technique and delicacy invested in creating the work. Yet this perspective has lost much validity within the long evolution of art, particularly following movements such as conceptual art, in which traditional notions of value were fundamentally challenged.
Howard Becker introduced the concept of art fields in his 1982 book Art Worlds, and his insights remain relevant today. Yet the landscape has shifted dramatically. AI platforms are no longer confined to the traditional spaces of galleries and museums. At a fundamental level, images are now being created through algorithms, which in turn offer a new way of evaluating art. The question of which artist will gain recognition is no longer solely in the hands of galleries; the algorithms of virtual platforms increasingly determine it. Take two identical images posted on Instagram with different advertising strategies – watch how these two photographs can follow drastically different paths and outcomes.
These new technologies enable almost anyone to produce images closely resembling the work of Rinko Kawauchi or Jeff Wall, but it seems misleading to suggest that anyone can truly become a Kawauchi or a Wall, in this prompt–ethea era, simply by generating similar images. They can only present themselves as Wall or Kawauchi, not as their authentic selves. Instead, the digital accessibility provided by these tools lets artists question and explore what it truly means to produce contemporary art in dialogue with established figures. By consciously embracing or deliberately rejecting these tools, artists can craft works that expand and redefine the boundaries and meanings of both the medium and contemporary art.
In Plato’s The Ion, Ion claims to be inspired by the gods when he recites poetry. Socrates challenges him, asking if he truly understands the meaning of the poems or if he is merely mimicking what others have written. Socrates proposes that Ion’s recitations are not the result of his own wisdom but are like a “magnet” that passes the divine inspiration from one person to another. He suggests that Ion is not a creator but a channel for something outside himself, much like an instrument through which inspiration flows.
The channels remain, though they are no longer gods or spiritual forces speaking through a human throat. Some 2,400 years after The Ion, this claim is unchanged. Yet creativity, which once emerged from years of practice and research exploration, is now reduced to feeding a prompt and an imported image into a machine: “Turn this picture into Studio Ghibli art.” Generating something in the style of Studio Ghibli is not enough to make someone creative. “Real” creativity nowadays seems to mean selecting a humorous, historical, trendy or famous photograph and proudly displaying the computer’s output.