Philosophy of Photography - Volume 16, Issue 2, 2025

This interview with Joanna Zylinska was conducted by Alex Fletcher on 8 July 2025. It focuses on Zylinska’s recent study The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future Between the Eye and AI (2023), which investigates the future of photography and human perception in the age of AI. The interview explores the critical affordances of key concepts developed in the book – including ‘a philosophy of after-photography’, ‘the perception machine’ and ‘planetary micro-vision’ – as well as Zylinska’s own media practice.

This article examines the current state of photography education in Australia amid neo-liberal restructuring, government disinvestment and the emergence of generative AI. It reflects on what is at stake when photography loses its disciplinary purchase, as well as the educator’s contradictory position working within systems that actively dismantle space for critical reflection. Prompted by the closure of a university photography programme and the wider decline of institutional support for photography as a discipline, this article examines the political and institutional factors that have made photographic practice and education increasingly uncertain. Drawing on the work of bell hooks and Ariella Azoulay, this article raises questions about what is lost when photography is instrumentalized for market outcomes and what it might mean to teach photography otherwise, if teaching it at all remains possible. It reflects on ‘unteaching photography’ as a potential way forward, using the camera’s ‘click’ as a contested gesture. It asks, most urgently, if photography education offers a space to think creatively and critically about images and their entanglements with power, what occurs when that space disappears?

This photowork presents extracts from a conversation between myself and Andrew Fisher, discussing two interconnected bodies of work: Counterfactual Departures (Bangkok Winter Gardens) (2023) and The Mute (2025). Both series use generative imaging platforms, Midjourney and ChatGPT as a form of speculative imaging practice. Counterfactual Departures is a series of synthetic images reimagining my Thai mother’s migration from Bangkok to Sydney as an event undocumented in photographs, drawing on prompts that capture a fragmented migration story with images that fails to fill a familial archive. The Mute expands from this personal specificity to the broader historical context of Thai women’s migration during the late 1960s and 1970s, drawing on archival resources. The dialogue examines the implications of using generative imaging as a technology of memory within the limitations of statistical aggregation and ethical safeguards set by imaging platforms. Our conversation considers the limitations of prompting historical trauma and its erasure or replacement while covering creative strategies used in both of the works. This includes a reflection of the way style, whether documentary or staged photography, functions as a referent in generative systems, determining the visualization of historical subjects, along with synthetic imaging’s speculative ‘what-could-have-been’ as a structure for collapsing personal and collective histories. We foreground how the qualities of AI imagery become part of an aesthetic strategy to consider the collapsing of cultural, historical, and personal narratives in datasets and the enduring influence of photographic conventions on how bodies, especially women’s bodies, are represented when mediated by generative AI.

The article explores the relationship between photography and generative AI, discussing whether AI-generated images that appear photographic can be considered photography or if they represent a distinct medium. To address this question, the article proposes drawing on the media-theoretical concept of ‘automatisms’, as advanced by Stanley Cavell and David N. Rodowick. Focusing on the emerging practice of ‘generative re-photography’, the article examines the ways in which artists Anja Engelke and Craig Ames deploy photographic automatisms in their works. By appropriating found photographs and recreating them synthetically, both artists demonstrate how multimodal generative AI is fundamentally dependent on the medium of photography and its history – particularly the photographic automatism of documentary recording. Rather than contrasting traditional photography with synthetic images, the works reflect on both their continuities and discontinuities, emphasizing the cultural automatisms embedded in technological automatisms.

Review of: Glitchy Vision: A Feminist History of the Social Photo, Amanda K. Greene (2024)

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 212 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-26255-082-6, p/bk, USD 39.53