Rivals: Photography vs Promptography – with Boris Eldagsen

Award-winning photomedia artist and theorist Boris Eldagsen leads a thought-provoking discussion on AI images (aka promptography) and photography that are becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish. 

Most areas of photography are being taken over by AI. What remains for photography? What is its unique strength that cannot be replaced by AI? And what is new about AI images? What can promptography do better than photography? This lecture gives photographers and AI artists new insights into their work and a clearer view of the future.

Presented in conjunction with the PSYCHOPOMP! exhibition, which explores AI-generated imagery as a form of active imagination and a mirror of the unconscious mind. While photography is rooted in physical engagement with real-world subjects, promptography produces psychological images through virtual imagination alone — turning the artist inward and eliminating the physical relationship between maker and subject. As such, AI appears as photography’s most powerful rival — an unsettling double —…