Counterfactual Departures, 1974 (Winter Gardens, Bangkok), 2023 - ongoing
In one of the most pivotal books of photographic theory, Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes described the noeme of photography, the punctum, as time, its unique capacity to represent the world as spatially present and yet, temporally anterior. Central to locating this unique quality of photographic ontology was a photograph of Barthes’s mother as a young girl, known as the Winter Garden photograph - almost, perhaps, emerging from his own catastrophic desire to locate his own point of origin.
The images in this series are created using the generative AI platform Midjourney. They are not made up of a singular moment in space and time, but are aggregated data from thousands of different moments in time and space - a collective archive that is also a dataset. As aggregated data, the AI photograph thinks with a unique temporality. Rather than being evidential images, they are speculative images that make us think about the artefacts and former photographic ways of seeing that culminate in their arrival.
These images attempt to use generative AI to depict my mother in 1974 at Bangkok International Airport migrating to Australia while pregnant to me - there are no existing photographs in my familial archive of this event. I used Midjourney’s dataset - the collective archive - to give an image to this undocumented event, and yet could not escape photographic ways of seeing and representing the past. Every prompt correlates to the title of each image, the source photographs draw from nineteenth century photographic studies of women and hysteria. Even though these are not evidential images, and generated from AI, we read these photographs, the racial subjects depicted in them, the gestures of the feminine, as deeply embedded in the cosmology of photography as a way of seeing and being.
