I collect raw human responses to my photographs.
No profiles. No likes. No validation loops.
The research investigates how the meaning of an image truly comes from the viewer’s cultural background and emotional state, and not really from the image itself. The image is simply a mirror.
Over time, it becomes an archive of interpretation.
It highlights the limitations of the AI driven algorithimic meaning making in the visual culture.
The meaning of an image is shaped primarily by the person who encounters it.
An image does carry meaning through its composition, pixels, subject, and colour tone. But a vast amount of meaning is produced at the moment of viewing. Meaning depends on when the image is seen, where it is seen, and in what context. It depends on the viewer’s personal history, emotional state, social position, financial anxieties, and their emotional bandwidth to perceive certain feelings at all.
The viewer is central.
And in that sense, AI’s attempt to generate images through algorithmic processes is fundamentally flawed.
Meaning cannot be predicted. It cannot be optimised.
Any attempt to do so is blunt, reductive, and ultimately meaningless.This project is an ongoing process that exposes the limits of AI-driven systems in deriving meaning from images.
The research itself is deeply human, raw, and grounded. Every meaning that emerges from an individual response is, in a way, an image that does not exist. It exists only in the collision between the photograph and the person viewing it. For a brief moment, even an instant, the viewer becomes the photograph for themselves.
The power of this research lies in misinterpretation.
In the gap between what the photographer expects an image to mean and what viewers actually experience.
The project begins with my personal archive of photographs, made for myself, for clients, for friends and family and opens them up to interpretation by others. Responses accumulate over time. They attach themselves to images without validation, without social metrics, without authentication, and without profiles. This absence of mediation is where their power lies. The responses stand on their own.
This work is contextualised through Roland Barthes’ ideas of studium and punctum. Studium refers to what an image signifies culturally, what it visibly and legibly communicates. Punctum, however, is what wounds. What interrupts. What catches unexpectedly. Punctum is not programmable. It emerges from a collision between a detail in the image and the viewer’s own history.
Over time, this archive becomes a record of those collisions.
The same image can produce radically diffferent punctums. Photography is truly inseparable from time, loss, and death, as Barthes writes. Perhaps death here is not only the death of the subject, but the death of the meaning itself.
Like all good things, this page is at an end and, honestly, I hate goodbyes, so let's say hello instead.
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