THIS IS NOT PHOTOGRAPHY
Works to define the difference between photography and AI-generated images
Mixed Media, work in progress, 2025 – ongoing
An artistic meta-critique of the distance between photography and AI-generated images (“promptography”).
After curating two major shows on this topic earlier this year (“RIVALS”, European Month of Photography Berlin, “PSYCHOPOMP!”, Roger Ballen Centre for Photography, Johannesburg), this is the first time I take on the subject as an artist myself, rather than curator or keynote speaker.
For me, photography begins with light: real photons bouncing off real things, entering a camera carried by someone who has stood in that moment, breathed its air, felt its temperature. AI is the opposite gravity: it asks you to stay inside, to conjure with words instead of wandering with a lens. You don’t need to meet the world – but you must meet yourself. Every prompt becomes a small act of introspection, a demand to know what you’re really asking for, and why.
“TRAP” (Part I & II)
Promptography (64 x 100 cm) & Polaroid, 2025
TRAP plays with the comfort we place in surface, format, and photographic ritual.
Part I mimics a classic film negative: sprocket holes, tonal depth, analog grain. But look a little longer – the scene inside breaks photographic logic, the way the “negative” is reproduced is full of formal mistakes. It is an AI hallucination dressed up in photographic drag.
Next to it, Part II: a real Polaroid, exposed through a Polaroid Land Camera. A “true” photograph. Yet what it captures is only a fragment of the hallucination from Part I. The camera verifies nothing; it simply photographs a fiction.
Together, the works stage a trap: the analog halo we trust no longer guarantees authenticity. One image only pretends to be photography; the other is photography, but without reality behind it. In this loop, the question becomes not what we see, but why we still believe the photograph tells the truth.
“Preloved Image, Loving You Back”
Promptography (20 x 20 cm), 2025
This work reimagines August Sander’s iconic portrait of three men, a cornerstone of German photographic history. In Eldagsen’s version, the men wear T-shirts whose slogans immediately puncture the illusion: It looks like a photo. It isn’t. — It looks like someone you knew. You didn’t. — It feels like remembering. It isn’t.
The familiar composition invites recognition, but the text destabilizes it. The image behaves like a photograph but refuses the authority of photography. A “preloved image” that mirrors us, plays with us.
“The End”
Promptography (300 x 200 cm), 2025
“The End” enlarges a Berlin graveyard into a monumental wallpaper, its tombstones scarred with WW2 bullet impacts. On two of them appears a stark message divided across the graves: “Something’s missing” / “And you know it”.
Between them lies a nude male photographer, shielding his genitals with one hand, holding a camera with the other. His body betrays another impossible detail: additional feet peek out from behind the stones where his own should be. A body that doesn’t match itself. A photographer who cannot be whole. A scene that cannot be real.
Installed together and seen in relation, the two works question the same fragile promise: One reworks a canonical image until it confesses its fiction; the other stages a documentary setting that collapses under its own impossibilities.
Installation View
“HAUNTOLOGY FOR BEGINNERS, Part I: Something’s Missing and You Know It”, La Chambre, Strasbourg / France, 22.11. – 25.01.26
“BLIND VISION”
AI-generated video, 02:15 min, 4K, 2025
For BLIND VISION, I borrow a guide from the dark: Jorge Luis Borges, the blind writer who saw further than most. He leads you through this work the way Virgil led Dante, not with sight, but with intuition, memory, and the shimmer of things half-remembered.
Here, vision is not what the eyes deliver; it’s what persists when they fail.
Step in, and follow Borges into the distance (and friction) between photography and AI-generated images.
“Ceci n’est pas un POLAROID”
Promptography (100 x 150 cm), 2025
The work appears to be a Polaroid at first glance: the white frame, the saturated colors, the 80ties look. But the illusion doesn’t hold. The format is too long to be any real Polaroid, and the woman holding the Land Camera betrays the trick: the “developing” picture emerging from the camera overlaps with the very image we are looking at. A photograph inside a photograph that cannot exist.
The pose and double presence of the two women echo The Electrician, while the declaration “ceci n’est pas un polaroid” nods to Magritte’s famous paradox painting. Both references challenge the viewer’s instinct to believe the surface. What claims to be a photograph is not one; what looks like documentation is fabrication.
This AI-image exposes the fragile contract between image and viewer and insists on its own contradiction: a Polaroid that isn’t a Polaroid, a memory that never happened, a visual object that makes visible the gap between what we see and what we think we see.
Installed in the space, the work is positioned so that ceci n’est pas un polaroid and The Electrician can be seen in a single glance, the installation sets up a deliberate feedback loop: two images that look photographic while slowly revealing how unstable that promise really is.
“…But You Walked Into a Loop”
Promptography (100 x 165 cm), 2025
The image stages a crisis that looks real only because it is being photographed. A burning car, a group of people calmly documenting the flames, a road sign cancelling the promise of moving forward — everything appears to exist for the camera.
We often believe a scene happened because a photograph exists. Here, the logic is reversed: the scene seems to happen because people are photographing it. Yet we never see a single image from their cameras. Their pictures lead nowhere. They produce evidence without an event.
Nothing in the scene behaves like reality — the fire, the bodies, the sign all follow the smooth, self-contained logic of AI imagery. It is an event without a witness, witnessed only by devices that show us nothing.
The work traps the viewer in that loop: something that looks like breaking news, captured from every angle, yet remains only a making-of — a reminder that in synthetic imagery, the spectacle replaces the event.
“Self-Portrait as a Failed Prompt”
Promptography (20 x 30 cm), 2025
The self-portrait begins like a staged family photograph but slips sideways. The photographer sits ready, camera in hand, while the child freely redraws his face, undoing any idea of control. The picture follows the logic of an AI misfire: the instruction is clear, the outcome playful and unpredictable. In the end, the failure is the message — a reminder that broken prompts, like broken photographs, often reveal more truth than the ones that work.
“It’s Complicated”
Promptography (20 x 30 cm), 2025
In THIS IS NOT PHOTOGRAPHY, this image stages a world where the familiar mechanics of photographic truth collapse into theatre. A boy performs a selfie with a snarling creature that isn’t alive, controlled by a man in a lab coat who isn’t fully present, within a scene that never existed outside the prompt. The T-shirt says the quiet part loud: the machine remembers what we prefer to repress. By mimicking documentary aesthetics while being entirely synthetic, the work exposes the fracture between photography’s claim to reality and AI’s talent for manufacturing it. It is a portrait of our age: everyone performing, nothing happening, and yet the illusion feels truer than the world outside the frame.
