The Third Space Versus the Feed

The FotoFocus Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, unveiled a permanent residence last month. It’s a 15,000-square-foot building with interlocking shades of black, sepia and white, a palette that the architect, José Garcia, conceived as a tribute to the origins of photography. The centre was envisioned as the main venue for the regional FotoFocus Biennial, one of the longest-running photography surveys in America, and as a space for year-round, in-person viewing of photography during an era when that experience has mostly migrated to screens.

The inaugural exhibition, Big Tent, examines the ‘ever-changing nature of American life’ through the work of fifty artists. One highlight is David Benjamin Sherry’s Tess Near White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, July 2015, a portrait of a queer teenager that has a strikingly vivid, almost supernatural quality. In his work, Sherry aims to explore the parallel between 'art and illusion”, he said in an artist talk on the opening weekend. Art, he asserted, asks people to suspend certainty. Viewers, like “audiences watching a magician”, know there is a mechanism behind what they are seeing, but willingly participate in the mystery. Sherry also spoke about the “magic” of analogue photography, likening it to an alchemical process. 

When I arrived in Cincinnati, there was a less mystical conversation happening around photography. A story had surfaced about the art dealer, James Danziger, using AI to ‘colourise’ Ansel Adams’s Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico (1941) and displaying the work in his booth at the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD) in New York City. People in the comment section were outraged. Danziger had bastardised an historic photograph for financial gain, and his edit wasn’t even good. One wrote: ‘Blasphemy.’ Another: ‘It’s disgusting.’ Another said the gesture was a ‘statement on our times’, and called out works like Sherrie Levine’s After Edward Weston (1980) and Marcel Duchamp’s take on Mona Lisa (and Salvador Dali’s take on Duchamp’s take).

Over dinner with other writers and publicists, the writer Stephen Frailey, who runs the photography publication Dear Dave Magazine, said Danziger had agreed to an interview. In the since-published interview, Danziger says he sought to reimagine what Adams must have seen driving through the Southwest, suggesting that Adams would have created something similar if only the technology had been available to him. Danziger cited Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film Romeo and Juliet as an example of the same thinking. He said most of the criticism came from people online who had seen low-resolution reproductions of the work, and that the reactions at AIPAD were largely positive, which is hard to believe. Danziger didn’t mention whether any of the works, which were priced between $6,000 and $10,000, had sold.

At the FotoFocus Center, I asked the curator Kevin Moore for his thoughts on AI and photography, and whether any works in the inaugural show used AI. “Not really,” he said. “Some works use traditional editing tools such as Photoshop, but not AI in the generative sense.” However, there was one exception: Trevor Paglen’s Bloom (#9b746d) (2020), a compelling work that speaks to machine vision and computational seeing. In the work, an image of a cherry blossom is superimposed using AI and becomes abstracted nearly beyond recognition. Unlike generative AI, the curator argued, Paglen’s work is not about generating images but about revealing the systems that are seeing for us.

Moore said that he “didn’t see AI becoming a trend in future programming” but in September, the centre will host a solo exhibition of Paglen’s work as part of the eighth edition of the FotoFocus Biennial. The presentation will grapple with “how computers see and how we interact with them, and how that can be problematic,” Moore said. According to Paglen’s proposal, the downstairs galleries will present “a relatively optimistic exploration of people interacting with machines, while the upstairs galleries will be much darker and more unsettling”. 

The following week, back in New York, Paglen held a talk with the writer Gideon Jacobs at the downtown Brooklyn Public Library to promote his new book, How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI. Paglen arrived wearing a shirt with the logo of the 1990s Japanese noise band Hanatarash, a group known for their live performances involving power drills and, on one occasion, excavating the wall of a venue. I only mention this to highlight that Paglen is cool and has an eclectic sensibility and approach to art. 

Paglen and Jacobs wove AI into topics ranging from spirituality and theology to the metaphysical nature of machine vision. That distinction in his thinking is what separates his work from many recent artistic experiments with AI. I told Paglen I had seen the show at FotoFocus and asked him his thoughts on what it means, on a practical and spiritual level, to have a physical space for viewing photography during a time when that’s not how we’re consuming or creating images. Paglen was optimistic and unwavering in his support for such places:

“Institutions like museums, schools and libraries [are] spaces for doing things that are outside of the feed, outside of the more brutal parts of capitalism, and outside of your job,” he said. “These are ‘third spaces’ that are meant to organise your attention in different ways than the feed does. I like working with institutions like that as they become increasingly detached from the online world of images, or the walk-around world of images that you might otherwise encounter. I think there are a lot of things you can do in those contexts. There are ways you can ask people to pay attention that you simply cannot ask them to do online.”

He added: “Having said that, I also work digitally. I mean, I’m very – I don’t want to say promiscuous – but I work across many different media and many different kinds of institutions. I’m very agnostic about that because each one of them can do different things. I’m trying to understand how different automated image systems work.”

Later on that night, as the Knicks played their second round in the NBA Finals, no one was on their phones. I was with a photographer friend who rattled off some grievances about AI, like how the artist-run Underdonk Gallery in Bushwick opened a show where the curator, Marcos Valella, used Claude, the Anthropic AI, to select artists from his Instagram followers and to write the press release. At Meredith Rosen Gallery in Midtown Manhattan, the artist Jennifer Rubell had recently debuted Attune, an artwork taking the form of an AI texting app that optimises your social interactions. “And the last name ‘Rubell’ isn’t a coincidence,” he said, in reference to her parents, who are major art collectors. The only fair he had made it to last month was AIPAD, where he didn’t remember seeing the Danziger booth. Very few people seemed to have seen the image in person. Yet it had folded into the feed, somehow becoming transcendent.