Berlin-based photographer Boris Eldagsen rejected the recognition from Sony World Photography Awards, saying that artificial intelligence (AI) images and photography should not compete with each other in similar contests.

In a statement published on his website, Erdagsen said that he applied to the competition “as a cheeky monkey” to find out if such events are prepared to handle AI-generated content.

The photographer also urged for debate on the role of AI in photography.

“We, the photo world, need an open discussion. A discussion about what we want to consider photography and what not,” wrote Eldagsen.

What does the AI-generated photo show?

Organizers of the award announced Eldagsen’s work, titled “Pseudomnesia: The Electrician”, as the winner of its creative category last month.

The sepia-colored image shows two women of different generations, one standing behind the other.

“How many of you knew or suspected that it was AI generated? Something about this doesn’t feel right, does it?,” said Eldagsen.

The artist pointed out that photography shouldn’t be confused with AI-generated content. “They are different entities. AI is not photography.”

How did the award organizers respond?

In an initial response, the awarding body accused Eldagsen of “deliberate attempts at misleading” them.

“As he has now decided to decline his award we have suspended our activities with him and in keeping with his wishes have removed him from the competition,” the organization said according to a statement provided to DW.

“While elements of AI practices are relevant in artistic contexts of image-making, the Awards always have been and will continue to be a platform for championing the excellence and skill of photographers and artists working in the medium,” the statement added.

They also said they were “looking forward to engaging in a more in-depth discussion” with the artist. 

Eldagsen wrote that it was “nonsense” to suggest that the organizers were willing to start a conversation with him.

According to the artist, the awarding body refused to answer questions from him and from journalists.

“They had so many options to use this for good. They used none of them,” said Eldagsen.

Later on Tuesday, the organizers removed the accusation of being misled in an edited statement sent to news agency AFP.

The AI image debate

Recently, AI has been making headlines with its ability to generate various content, from detailed travel itineraries to academic essays and code in various programming languages.

AI-generated images have recently flooded the internet, sparking a conversation around AI and disinformation. 

Last month, artificially created images showing the arrest of former US President Donald Trump caused controversy online.

With new language models like DALL-E 2, users are able to create detailed and realistic images from text input in a matter of seconds. 

DW has written a handy checklist on how to spot AI-generated images.

vh/jcg (AFP, dpa)

While you’re here: Every Tuesday, DW editors round up what is happening in German politics and society. You can sign up here for the weekly email newsletter Berlin Briefing.

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SUV crashes through Arkansas photography studio for infants

Updated: 12:57 PM CDT Apr 18, 2023

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A driver crashed through the wall of a photography studio for newborns in Lowell Tuesday morning.The Ford Escape went into the Footsteps Photography studio just before 8 a.m. Amanda Webb, who owns the studio, said that if the crash had come just a couple of hours later, there would have been babies posing against the very wall the driver destroyed.Chris Johnson was parked across the street when he heard what sounded like an explosion.Get the latest news stories of interest by clicking here.When he saw the SUV through the hole in the wall of the studio, he ran inside.”Tires had popped but they were still spinning,” Johnson said. “I just started beating on the windows to see if I could get anybody to holler out but nobody did.”Johnson tried to pry the door open but wasn’t able to.A fire broke out and filled the room with smoke, forcing him to leave after about three minutes.>> Download the 40/29 News AppEmergency workers came on the scene and pried the doors open.Johnson saw firefighters carry out a toddler, who appeared conscious. He also saw a man leave the car, who appeared shaken up.40/29 News has reached out to Lowell police for more information about the crash.Top Headlines Fayetteville police say officer arrived just seconds after woman was stabbed to death USPS offices no longer stay open late on tax deadline day Northwest Arkansas tax centers give advice for last-minute taxes McCurtain County Sheriff’s Office claims audio recordings were altered

Jeff Burk, “Rock Fall, IL”

A portal serves as a door, an entrance that connects one space to another. The Kansas City Society for Contemporary Photography exhibit “Portals and Reflections” offers viewers a visual gateway between worlds. Twenty-five local fine art photographers produced 50 images displayed at Kindness Gallery. Aptly, these works are entry points into constructed realities as well as a transitory waystation to dwell in the past and present.

Step through the doorway of the unassuming brick building next to Blackhole Bakery along the busy corridor of Troost Avenue. Once physically standing inside the spartan gallery, viewers are able to mentally journey to disparate places. TR Barnard’s two star-swept works printed on metal, “Van Goghst” and “As the World Turns,” portray the night sky as a “portal into the universe that surrounds us, protecting us and keeping us grounded.”

“Rock Fall, IL” by Jeff Burk studies a door frame unattached to walls and located in a cleared paved lot occupied by weeds. Leafy trees, a house, and a car in the near distance appear to represent another plane of existence. The juxtaposition of an object with seemingly abandoned purpose and the suburban backdrop invites the viewer to step beyond the image and imagine a story to address questions of what, why, where, and how.

Paige Burrows spent the summer of 2022 exploring the world through windows. Burrows photographed what she saw in windows and through them as well as the frame itself. “Alpine Tunnel” depicts alpine trees on a hill poised to thrust into cottony clouds. Crossbars in a window frame create a focal point to anchor the viewer’s gaze. Burrows “plays with reflection and abstracts” in her photos as a “pathway to a mysterious edgy vibe” as found in “Pikes Peak.”

Shirley Harryman’s “Uncertain-Reflections” ventures to Caddo Lake, home to the world’s largest cypress swamp. Two black-and-white images capture towering cypress trees in silhouette. Their reflection on the watery surface reveals a haunting yet peaceful scene, a portal to an otherworldly realm.

“RIP Brancusi” by Jackson Daugherty parlays a distorted reflection into an examination of corporate architecture in Dallas, Texas, prompting thought about the permanence of hierarchy and status. What meets the eye externally distracts and obscures what behavior occurs within the building’s structure.

Jacquelyn Carioscia’s “Fenestella” challenges viewers to study an arrangement of circular shapes and consider vantage points in order to extract meaning with scant context. Converging lines in Gary Hodson’s “Underground Passage” propel the viewer toward a vanishing point. Bold colorful graffiti escorts the eyes along the way. As a portal to the Cold War era, “Stairway to Past Armageddon” by Nate Hofer shows a dark concrete stairway leading underground to a former nuclear missile storage bunker in Gardner, Kansas.

The exhibit provides not only a portal across space and time, but also a series of looking glasses to examine, explore, and reflect on what we encounter.

“Kansas City Society of Contemporary Photography: Portals and Reflections,” continues through April 29 at Kindness Gallery, 5529 Troost. Hours are 11 to 4 p.m., Saturdays. For more information, kcscp.org.

The evening is warm, the party has gone late. How warm, how late: it’s hard to say. Enough that the window is cracked open, a black square of night visible beyond it. Warm enough and late enough that everyone is on the floor. Two people lie side by side, knees bent beneath them. In the corner, someone’s on their back, fingers wrapped around a glass beer bottle. It’s hard, in the photograph, to say where one body ends and another begins. Yes, we are at that point in the party. An empty pack of cigarettes lies stranded toward the bottom of the frame, its smoke gone somewhere out the window and into the night. 

When I first saw this image—the 2008 photograph Birthday Party by the German artist Wolfgang Tillmans—it was a small printout, taped to the wall of the co-operative house in Boston where I lived for my last year of college. I mistook it, at first, for a photo taken in that house. It was an easy mistake to make. How many times had I seen a scene like this—of sticky wine and smoke and uncomplicated touch from all sides—happen here? Countless. They blurred together in my mind. Seeing Tillmans’ photo, these moments shuffled into focus with uncanny clarity. It was like coming across a high-definition rendering of a faded memory: a memory that was not mine, of course, but that felt, somehow, like it was. 

The photo hangs now at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), where Tillmans’ exhibit To look without fear—the first major showing of the photographer’s work in Canada—opens this month. To look without fear arrives after its debut at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) last fall, drawing together images from across three decades of the artist’s career. Dispatches from ’90s queer clubs in Berlin and London sit beside abstract compositions of form and colour across from still lifes of flowers and lobsters. Together, these assembled works ask for a certain way of looking, one suggested by the exhibit’s infinitive title. Describing what motivates him to capture a moment, Tillmans has remarked: “I want to record it, so there is a record of it.” His record urges the viewer to remember places and intimacies and pleasures that might otherwise blur into the past—out of focus, out of view. 

Even if the name Wolfgang Tillmans is unfamiliar, there’s a good chance that you’ve seen his work. In 2017, Tillmans’ portrait of Frank Ocean, titled Frank, in the shower, appeared on the cover of Ocean’s acclaimed album Blonde. In the photo, Ocean’s hand obscures his face, green buzzcut peeking out above. Last year Tillman’s work surfaced in bookstores when The Cock (kiss)—a photo of two men, well, kissing—was featured on the cover of the novel Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart. These ongoing circulations of Tillmans’ photography are both a testament to his wide-ranging influence on our visual culture (he’s been called “one of the world’s most significant living artists” by the New York Times), as well as a barometer of his continuing influence on queer artists across forms. 

Tillmans was born in 1969 in the small German manufacturing town of Remscheid. As a teenager, Tillmans would catch the train into London—ostensibly to take English classes, which he did, but also to put on lipstick in the train station and try his luck at the city’s gay nightclubs, getting back on the train home before midnight. One of his earliest photographs that he considers a work of art is a self-portrait from 1986, Lacanau (Self). Tillmans holds the camera from above, angling it down at his body. What we see is a wide swath of pink T-shirt, his leg barely separated from the ground beneath it. It’s both hyper-realist and willfully abstract, charged with the youthful exertion of a body feeling out its proportional space in the world.

Tillmans photography has gone on to consider that question of how to render, in two dimensions, the three-dimensional problem of the human body—its constraints and liberations, its sculptural possibilities. He’s an attentive and accomplished portraitist in the fashion world, whose photos of Kate Moss and Chloë Sevigny appear in To look without fear. But the body really comes alive, under Tillmans’ lens, in scenes of proximity and obscurity—in nightclubs and house parties, bathrooms and bedrooms. “I want to capture the community of being together,” Tillmans explains during a preview of the AGO show, “as a couple, as friends, as a group, as a mass. Sharing this togetherness is also always sharing solidarity, shouldering and appreciating the hardship and joy of what it means to be alive.”

In the 1990s, Tillmans started to create a growing body of these images when he left Germany to study photography in the U.K. He’d tried his hand at art school back home, but dropped out after six weeks—one day before the Berlin Wall fell. In England, Tillmans stuck with it, producing lasting works of, as he puts it, “guys and girls feeling each other on the dance floor.” One 1992 series titled Chemistry Squares depicts scenes at Chemistry, a house and techno night at the now-defunct Sound Shaft club in London. (As a rule, Tillmans does not display images of underground spaces or parties until they have closed down.) The dozens of images are just glimpses—each a small square of detail, a couple inches wide, displayed side by side—as if caught between strobe lights on the dancefloor. A hand with a cigarette. A back of a neck. A flash of hair beneath a raised arm.

As a “record” of those evenings, the photographs leave much unsaid. We have no sense of what Chemistry looked like, who was in attendance, how much it cost to get in. Tillmans’ photos are evocative, however, as coordinates to the heat map of that night, witnessed from up close. The camera knows—and so tells us—how one person saw another, the facts of skin that formed the bodies that formed the crowd. Perhaps, the photos suggest, you must get this close to understand what it was really like to be there. So close that now, decades after the club has closed, sweat still collects on a neck beneath the lights.

At the AGO artist preview, Tillmans, wearing a green jacket from ’90s-influenced streetwear brand Palace, passes through the gallery rooms while discussing the past few days. He’s been busy. In collaboration with his team and the museum, the artist has adapted his MoMA exhibit specifically for the AGO space. Pieces have been resized, rearranged. Today, a week out from the exhibit’s opening, Tillmans is focused and deliberative, but never serious. His smile flashes often. At one point, Tillmans indicates a pair of metal beams where two images are affixed. “These beams interested me,” he says, “because they are 12 inches—the size of the prints I’ve been using since the early ’90s.” He smiles again. “I’m like a child when he realizes something fits.”

As has become standard for Tillmans’ exhibits, most photos in To look without fear are displayed without frames. Instead, the artist uses Scotch Tape or binder clips to hang his images. It’s an improvised, offhand aesthetic that belies its careful planning, orchestrated down to the inch. The exhibit, arranged in roughly chronological order, forces you to use your body—leaning back to see one photo, bending down to see the next. When the MoMA show premiered last fall, critics and viewers alike talked about that sense of scale, with scenes of the past surrounding you from all directions. Crowded raves and old Pride parades. Adidas tracksuits and clunky bass synthesizers. One reviewer confessed: “The show made me so nostalgic that at times, I wanted to crouch down and weep.”

But there’s more than easy nostalgia at work here. History, in these rooms, is too unresolved, too particular to Tillmans’ life. Halfway through the first room, I come across a large sepia image from 1995 titled Deer Hirsch. In it, Jochen Hirsch—Tillmans’ first love, who passed of AIDS-related pneumonia two years after the photo was taken—stands facing a deer on a wide beach. Hirsch’s hands are raised, indicating he has no more food to give. The deer sticks out its tongue in reply. “The photo looks like it was a big production,” Tillmans admits, “but in fact it was just an afternoon walk. What you are seeing is that Jochen had just fed all our food to the deer.” There’s such suspended tenderness in the image that I hesitated to speak when near it—out of reverence for having stepped into Tillmans’ memory, out of care not to startle the animal away.

For Tillmans, the past is unresolved, particular—and alive. In a final room containing work from the current millennium, the artist shifts the scale of his archival eye. Several tables fill the large space, each one covered with fragments of text. There are newspaper articles about the Iraq war. There are think pieces about the rise of homophobia and nationalism. There are scientific reports on microplastics in the human body. It’s part of the series titled truth study center, a collection of media sources that construct the reality according to which our lives are governed. On the surrounding walls, the exhibit assembles photos we might think of as archetypal Tillmans: a hand reaching into a pair of red gym shorts, a queer club in New York. The tables sit below, gazing up, as reminders of the operations of power that run always beneath these intimate scenes. (When I say always, I mean it: I was surprised to find an article discussing caste discrimination in the Toronto school system, dated just two weeks prior.)

“History is not something other,” Tillmans explains. “History is right here and now, and we have to take care of this moment.” Keeping a record of our moment, for Tillmans, still involves capturing the shared choreographies of “being together.” Yet he also acts, increasingly, as a custodian of large-scale power structures that define past and present. In all of these roles, Tillmans is engaged in a practice that asks us to look at—and then remember—what is at risk of going unseen. Something so small it escapes notice: a splinter in the foot, a touch in a crowded club. Something so big it evades depiction: beliefs we take for granted, invisible as air, about the way things must be.

Looking up from the tables, I notice, in a far corner, Birthday Party—the same photo of a warm evening years ago that hangs in a house where I once lived. Or, almost the same one. Tillmans considers each print of his to be a distinct physical fact, defined by its material quality and where it is placed in the world. Again pointing out something I hadn’t noticed, he indicates the thin shadow cast between image and wall. “Looking sideways, we can see that this is not nothing. A photograph is actually a body.” I turn around and take in the crowded gallery walls, dozens of images and their shadows filling the room. As Tillmans walks ahead, quick enough that some air displaces around him, you could swear—for a moment—the photos behind him begin to move.