Photography After Photography
We live in an age where images multiply faster than we can process them. Billions are made every day, most of them never touched by a human hand in the way the old darkroom demanded. Cameras are still everywhere, but they no longer hold the monopoly on what looks like a photograph. Algorithms now generate portraits, landscapes, even entire narratives that feel photographic, though no light ever touched film or sensor. This is where the phrase post-photography comes in.
Post-photography does not declare the death of photography. It points to an expanded condition. Photography has slipped its old skin, the simple act of recording light, and grown into a more complicated creature that folds together cameras, code, networks, and now AI. What matters is not only the click of the shutter. What matters is how images are produced, circulated, and believed.
I have been thinking about this shift in the context of two of my recent projects, The Faces of Mexico and Stories from the Creek. Both began with a photographic impulse: to capture, to preserve, to bear witness. Yet both quickly moved into territories where photography’s traditional boundaries start to blur.
The Faces of Mexico: A Study in Truth and Perception began as a portrait project. I photographed people in Mexico—vendors, neighbors, passersby—with the same dignity and restraint I have always brought to portraiture. Then I folded in another layer: AI-generated likenesses that mimic the same style, the same monochrome gravity, yet depict no one who has ever lived.
I do not label which is which. The viewer has to linger, to doubt, to decide. In that hesitation lies the point. For a century we trusted photographs as evidence. Today we know better, but we still want to believe. The project exploits that fragile trust. It reminds us that authenticity is slippery, that representation has always been part truth and part construction. The camera never guaranteed honesty, but now even the trace of reality can be absent, replaced by pixels spun from statistical patterns.
This is post-photography at work: not abandoning portraiture, but expanding it into a field where human presence and machine invention coexist, forcing us to recalibrate what it means to look someone in the eye.
Stories from the Creek takes this expansion in a different direction. Centered on Dubai Creek, a place thick with history, the project uses AI-generated portraits and AR overlays to bring the past and future into the present. Scan a QR code and suddenly a pearl diver appears on the shore. Tap again and you hear his story, voiced by a synthetic narrator. Walk further and you might encounter traders, boatbuilders, or speculative visions of what the Creek could become.
None of these figures were photographed in the traditional sense. They were imagined through AI, positioned in the real landscape through augmented reality, and given voices to carry their narratives. The result is not pure documentation, but it is not pure fiction either. It is a hybrid, a speculative documentary that acknowledges the gaps in the archive and chooses to fill them creatively.
Here, post-photography manifests as experience rather than image. It is not about a single frame hanging on a wall, but about an encounter that layers history, imagination, and machine collaboration. You do not just see the photograph, you walk through it.
Both projects share a conviction: photography has not ended, it has expanded. A portrait can be both a tribute and a trick. A documentary can be both a record and a dream. The camera is one tool among many, no longer the arbiter of truth but part of a wider system where images, algorithms, and human choices constantly fold into one another.
This expanded field demands that we, as viewers, become more critical and more attentive. We can no longer assume that looking equals knowing. Instead, we must ask: who made this image, through what process, and to what end? At the same time, the expansion opens creative possibilities that were unimaginable before. Artists can now stitch together realities, resuscitate forgotten histories, or invent entirely new ones, still through the photographic imagination but unbound from its old constraints.
For me this thread stretches back to my MFA thesis show Inner Self | Outer World, where I first experimented with hybridity by digitally blending portraits into hybrid identities. The questions of authorship, authenticity, and perception that surfaced in that work remain central today, only now the tools are more complex and the stakes around truth and representation are even higher.
That is what I mean when I place my work under the umbrella of post-photography. Not a farewell to the photograph, but an invitation to engage with it differently. To recognize its instability. To embrace its potential. And to see, in that unstable ground, a new terrain for art, memory, and storytelling.
