Photography was, for a long time, the visual equivalent of an oath. An image was evidence that something had existed — that a moment had been real, that a body had occupied a space, that light had touched a surface. Roland Barthes called this property the noema of photography: "it has been" — the ontological affirmation that no other image could make with the same force. Today, this certainty has cracked irremediably.

From trace to construction

In the classical paradigm, photography functioned as an index — in Peirce's sense: a trace caused by the object it represents, not an interpretation of it. Even when the photographer chose the frame, the light, or the decisive moment — in Cartier-Bresson's sense — there was a physical, direct connection between the world and the image. The camera did not invent: it recorded.

Vilém Flusser was the first to signal the fragility of this relationship. In Towards a Philosophy of Photography, he warned that the photographer always operates within the programme of the apparatus — that what appears to be a free choice is, in fact, the navigation of possibilities predefined by technology. The apparatus is not neutral: it prescribes what can be photographed and how.

In the generative AI era, Flusser's argument becomes radical. The image is no longer captured — it is calculated. Diffusion or GAN models do not reproduce reality; they synthesise statistical distributions of the images they have "seen" in training. The result is an image that looks photographic, but which has no referent in photographable reality. There is no moment that has been. There is no light that has touched a surface. There is only visual probability.

Fontcuberta and the end of the document

Joan Fontcuberta anticipated this mutation decades before the emergence of generative models. In Furyography and in the Sputnik series, he constructed false archives, non-existent biographies, never-discovered species — and presented them with all the formal attributes of the photographic document. The lesson was not that photography lies, but that photography can lie with a credibility that no other image possesses. And now, this capacity has left the hands of the provocative artist and entered the infrastructure of everyday visual culture.

Today, an image generated with Midjourney or Stable Diffusion can be distributed, cited, and made viral — without any external sign to indicate that it has no real referent. We no longer live in a culture of the image-document. We live in a culture of the image-construct, in which visual credibility has detached itself from ontology.

Practice as response

In my artistic practice, this mutation is not a problem to be solved — it is the working material. Photography becomes a starting point, not an end. The process continues through digital intervention, visual reinterpretation, and the integration of generated elements — not to simulate the real, but to expose the tension between what has been and what could be.

The intended result is ambiguity: an image in which the viewer can no longer establish with certainty the boundary between capture and construction. This suspension is not a defect — it is the conceptual stake. It forces a question that contemporary visual culture systematically avoids: what does it still mean to believe an image?

The image as position, not as window

In an ecosystem in which anything can be generated, the image can no longer function as a neutral window onto the real. It inevitably becomes a position — an affirmation about how the author sees the world, what they choose to construct and with what intention. Barthes spoke of the punctum as the detail that pierces the gaze and restores an affective connection with the image. In the generative era, the punctum no longer comes from reality — it comes from the artist's decision.

The question that matters is no longer "Is this image real?" — but "What position does this image sustain, and who assumes it?" Responsibility did not disappear with the document. It was redistributed — from the apparatus that recorded, to the artist who constructs and signs.

References

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.

Flusser, Vilém. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. London: Reaktion Books, 2000.

Fontcuberta, Joan. El beso de Judas: fotografía y verdad. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1997.

Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers, vol. II. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1932.