Last year Boris Eldagsen won, but refused, a prize at the Sony World Photography Awards. The German photographer’s entry, “The Electrician”, was a striking black-and-white image depicting two women staring out of the frame, seemingly lost in thought. But the image was not created with a camera. Mr Eldagsen admitted he had been a “cheeky monkey” by entering a picture generated using artificial intelligence. He hoped to start a conversation about “what we want to consider photography and what not
On Thursday “The Electrician” goes on display at the Palmer Gallery in London. It is part of “Post-Photography: The Uncanny Valley”, an exhibition of art made with AI systems. The show includes other playful works of “promptography” by Mr Eldagsen, alongside absorbing images by Ben Millar Cole, a British photographer, and Nouf Aljowaysir, a Saudi-born artist. In centuries past artists relied on studio assistants. In the future they will collaborate with deep-learning models such as DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion.
