This article examines the evolving relationship between photography, archives, and cultural memory in the context of AI-generated imagery. It considers how contemporary artists, such as Elena Efeoglou, engage with photographic traditions through generative AI tools to reimagine archives — specifically of August Sander’s work — to explore themes of individualization, typification, and collective memory. Drawing on Aleida Assmann’s theories of the archive, the article discusses the role of archives in preserving traces of the past, as part of a ‘passive remembering.’ Efeoglou’s project is taken to exemplify how AI-generated images, combined with fictional narratives, create ‘virtual photographs’ that evoke ‘possible memories,’ challenging traditional notions of photographic truth and authenticity. The article argues that generative AI disrupts conventional understandings of style, individualization, and typology, blending historical and stylistic elements through algorithmic processes that produce stereotypical and a-historical yet photorealistic images. It also considers the implications of the capacity of generative AI to simulate photographic styles at large, transforming the archive into a space of speculative and visual reinvention. Ultimately, the integration of AI imagery into the archive signifies a new form of passive cultural memory, with the potential of reshaping our and later perception of history, representation, and collective memory in the digital age.

This theoretical paper examines machinic and human time as distinct ways of recalling and fabricating memory through my series An Incantation in Twelve Prompts (2023). The work unpacks different forms of memory and the role of speculative imaginaries as a mode of repair, and the techno-cultural implications of creative practice by using a break-up poem as a vehicle for tracing the evolving relationship between the artist and the photographic medium. Leveraging text-to-image AI systems, these works explore how generative processes both augment and destabilize traditional notions of personal and collective photographic memory. Drawing on Svetlana Boym’s concepts of reflective and restorative nostalgia, Marianne Hirsch’s theory of postmemory, and neuroscientist Dean Buonomano’s work on time, the paper situates AI as a force that reconfigures the relationship between image, language, and cultural memory. An Incantation in Twelve Prompts stages an exchange between artist and machine, probing how algorithmic systems mediate visual and narrative storytelling. Referencing generative practices such as Joan Fontcuberta’s Googlegrams, the paper positions AI as an inheritor and transformer of collaborative strategies between systems and creators. It argues that AI functions as a disruptive and reflective agent within the history of photography, reshaping how memory, speculation, and representation are produced.

This article interprets a news photograph from southeastern Turkey that documents state-perpetrated violence against Kurds. There are two primary reasons for selecting this photograph for analysis. First, it embodies necropolitical violence against Kurds rarely visible in the Turkish public sphere. Second, it obscures its intended message, unlike typical news photography. However, the subject of the photograph demands visibility, and its peculiarities open the door for productive theoretical discussions. The aim of this article is to make this implicit photograph visible without exceeding the ethical boundaries of the image itself and to contribute to its visibility in the public sphere. In this regard, the methodological framework of the paper is primarily informed by Ariella Azoulay’s contemporary discussions on photography. The analysis employs her concepts of the photographed event and the event of photography, which effectively overcome the limitations of early photographic theories, such as those of Sontag. These two concepts expand the definition and spatio-temporal existence of photography, facilitating an exploration of the implicit redundancy within the photograph. Additionally, Barbie Zelizer’s notion of the subjunctive voice is applied to address the silence within the image and to create a space and a voice for the photograph within Turkey’s civil-political discourse.

Reconstrucción, 2016, by Rosana Simonassi (b.1974), is a materially complex photobook that critiques the media’s fascination with fatal acts of violence against women, while destabilising the relation of photobook, reader and archive. Close analysis of a specific encounter with Reconstrucción in the National Art Library in 2018 foregrounds three aspects of the book — folds, death and dirt — which emphasise realities of its circulation and consumption. While Reconstrucción ostensibly comprises restaged scenes of femicide, its use of obstructing pages, unusual folds and unexpected spills of dirt deploys the material form of the photobook to generate a more reflexive, implicated readerly encounter with the spectacle of death. By situating the photobook in relation to the artist’s wider practice, the article argues the photobook offers a new logic for presentation and dissemination that: expands the artwork’s conceptual resonance; re-examines photography’s relationship with death; disrupts notions of authorship and readership; and speaks broadly to issues of gendered violence. These insights also reveal tensions around how photobooks are accessed and encountered in institutional spaces, virtually through databases, and in reading rooms. The epistemological regime of the museum art library thus makes ontological understandings about this individual photobook and the historiography of the medium more generally.

Berenice Abbott’s 1932 photomural New York is a troublesome work in the photographer’s oeuvre. Commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) for the exhibition Murals by American Painters and Photographers, New York is Abbott’s first and only mural-sized photomontage. Its exceptional status has led scholars — and even Abbott herself — to dismiss the piece as a fluke. This paper reevaluates the mural, considering its importance as an experimental project that allowed Abbott to hone her realist and documentary approach to photography. Exploring the mural’s form, content, and history reveals a range of influences and constraints including Soviet exhibition design, theories of polyphonic literature, and MoMA’s efforts to depoliticize muralism. Abbott’s photomural synthesizes these diverse perspectives, encouraging viewers to look closely and think critically about the reality it depicts.

This essay proposes conceptualizing photography as enactments of the subjunctive mood — i.e. as expressing wishes, proposals, suggestions, or imagined circumstances. Approached as a form of ocular speculation, photography is conceptualized as liquid and ambient in character and imaginative in its impetus, and the ‘photographer’ thereby reconceived as an engagement of consciousness and as a disposition. These ideas inform the re-examination of the long-standing concept of previsualization, turning it from a technical skill to a posture toward the world that is trained on dialoguing with the foreseeable. The non-material, conjectural substance of photographs and photography are explored through a consideration of photographs not taken and of those ‘taken’ without a camera. Together, these discussions seek to encourage a reorientation regarding the relationship between what photography ‘does’ and what photographs ‘are’ by foregrounding the ever-present dynamic of consciousness that interlaces imagination with desire.

The Norwegian photographer Knud Knudsen (1832–1915) built a successful career as a landscape photographer in the late 1800s, shaping the popular image of Norwegian landscapes. Less known is his parallel passion and career as a pomologist, running orchards with thousands of fruit trees and cultivating hundreds of new varieties. Knudsen was a pioneer in photography and pomology, both practices that must be seen as examples of man’s attempt at technological control over nature, which developed at the advent of the Anthropocene. This article argues that Knudsen’s photographs of pomological work demonstrate how control is codependent with care. His photographs effectively display the dichotomy of care, revealing the extent of intellectual, physical, and emotional effort that goes into caregiving while, on the other hand, exposing the uneven distribution of power at play in caretaking, where one part is reliant on the other.

This article develops a theoretical analogy between photography and plants, engaging with contemporary ideas on care in a more-than-human world. The analysis is based on a selection of vernacular archival images from the Svalbard region, captured by temporary settlers in the mining towns between the 1920s and 1980s, now housed in the Arctic archives and made digital available to everyone. In the High Arctic, both plants and humans live under sparse climatic and social conditions, exacerbated by the pressures of modern extraction of natural and human resources. Despite these pressures, photographs bear witness to the relationships of care established by humans and plants. The article is influenced by Joanna Zylinska’s theories on posthuman photography and ‘fluid archive’, and engages with Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s concept of care, exploring its ambiguity. The photographs in the Arctic archives raise ethical considerations, particularly regarding human exploitation and domination, the troubling legacy of colonialism, and the collapse of ecosystems. The notion of natureculture, and proposed parallels between the lives of plants and photography, contribute to the speculation about a future Arctic with migration of plants and peoples, and of the transforming of life forms.

The objective of this essay is to propose a hermeneutic socio-semiotic model that helps build an interdisciplinary photographic critique based on theoretical foundations. How to carry out a photographic review? How to use and map theoretical-methodological perspectives about photography? The contemporary socio-technical context of images has placed photography in a complex sociocultural, technological and discursive scenario, which requires an epistemological map to help guide the construction of a critical-theoretical discourse for it to be understood. In this way, a model with two purposes is suggested, to serve as a chart for navigating the ocean of perspectives and theoretical references of the critical discourses of photography; and to serve as a starting point to build a hermeneutic and interdisciplinary socio-semiotic critique. The application of the model is exemplified by the analysis of Max Siedentopf’s production, How to Survive a Deadly Global Virus, 2020. The proposed experimental model has a hermeneutic, flexible, open, non-exclusive or limiting character, which contributes to the construction of a theoretically grounded critique of photographic images.