My research investigates the transformation of photography in an era characterized by synthetic, computational images that are increasingly detached from traditional photographic referents. I focus on the implications when photographs are no longer primarily understood as indexical traces of reality, but rather as products of algorithmic prediction, machine vision, latent possibility, and cultural memory. This transformation is not solely technical; it fundamentally alters how images engage with concepts such as truth, embodiment, landscape, desire, memory, and power.
Presently, my research is guided by three primary objectives. First, I aim to contribute to the development of a critical language for understanding post-optical and post-indexical photography within the broader context of photographic history. Second, I utilize studio practice as a mode of research, enabling images to interrogate philosophical and cultural questions that written analysis alone cannot fully address. Third, I seek to create a body of work that encourages students, artists, and scholars to critically engage with artificial intelligence and machine vision, not merely as tools, but as defining visual conditions of the contemporary era.
My current paper, The Fifth-Dimensional Image: Post-Indexical Photography and the Space of Possibility, provides the theoretical foundation for this research. In this work, I contend that AI-generated imagery signifies not the end of photography, but its expansion into a new ontological state. While traditional photography is grounded in the inscription of light over time, post-indexical image production operates within a space structured by probability, computation, training data, and relationality. Images are no longer defined solely by what appeared before the lens; they are increasingly shaped by what can be imagined, inferred, synthesized, and rendered. Drawing on photographic theory, semiotics, philosophy, and media studies—including the work of Peirce, Bazin, Barthes, Manovich, and Zylinska—this paper articulates a transformation that is actively reshaping visual culture.
My writing is intimately linked to my studio practice. I regard theory and image-making as interconnected forms of inquiry that continuously inform each other. Recent post-optical projects employ AI image generation and machine-mediated processes to explore the types of images that emerge once photography’s indexical certainty is no longer present.
The first such project, Machine Dreams, investigates the body and the politics of observation. It examines how the historical dynamics of the gaze in art, from the male gaze to the colonial gaze, are being reconfigured through artificial intelligence. The resulting images interrogate what machine vision identifies as legible, desirable, useful, or unfamiliar in the human form. Rather than positioning AI as a neutral image-making system, the project analyzes how algorithmic images perpetuate established structures of bias, objectification, classification, and control, thereby constituting what I imagine must be a “machine gaze.”
The second project, The Americans (2026), comprises a series of AI-generated portraits that reimagine the American social body through photographic archetypes. This project depicts figures such as an activist, politician, tech billionaire, criminal, social media influencer, worker, and other recognizable cultural types, not as representations of specific individuals, but as synthetic composites shaped by collective visual memory. I investigate how AI systems construct “Americanness” through accumulated stereotypes, biases, fantasies, and representational habits embedded in their training data. Thus, the project employs artificial intelligence not to depict America directly, but to reveal how America has already been represented, categorized, and mythologized through images.
A third project, Inside of Elsewhere, emerged from my engagement with Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. This work reimagines domestic space as a psychological landscape. Elements such as closets, hallways, cabinets, floorboards, attics, basements, and walls are treated as sites of memory, secrecy, fear, longing, and personal formation. The project explores how the spaces we inhabit in childhood continue to influence the internal architecture of the adult self. In this context, post-optical photography enables the creation of images that function less as documentation of rooms and more as visualizations of emotional memory.
Collectively, these projects establish a research agenda focused on the evolving status of images following the decline of photographic certainty. I am particularly interested in how synthetic media intersects with misinformation, environmental imagination, algorithmic bias, embodiment, and the politics of representation. My long term objective is to advance this work through peer-reviewed publications, conference presentations, exhibitions, public lectures, and interdisciplinary collaborations.
In summary, my research investigates how photography can be expanded beyond the lens while retaining its critical, poetic, and philosophical significance. I maintain that the post-optical image does not represent a break from photography’s history, but rather constitutes one of the most pressing avenues through which that history continues to develop.