AIMAGINE - PHOTOGRAPHY AND GENERATIVE IMAGES | HANGAR ART
Cherry Airlines, 2024 © Pascal Sgro
Written by Amy Wei
In an era when artificial intelligence reshapes visual storytelling, AImagine – Photography and Generative Images at Hangar Art examines the intersection of photographic truth and machine-generated art. Featuring works from 18 artists, the exhibition explores how captured and created images mediate our relationship with reality, memory, and speculation. The diverse range of perspectives underscores the breadth of contemporary image-making practices, from documentary realism to AI-driven fantasy.
Protomaton, 2024 © François Bellabas
One of the exhibition’s core themes is the instability of photographic truth. Photography has long been associated with witnessing and documentation, but AI-generated images complicate these notions by offering hyperreal scenes that feel both authentic and speculative. Works such as Bruce Eesly’s New Farmer series exemplify this, presenting rural landscapes that appear to be historical records but are subtly altered by machine intervention. A notable image in this series, “A broccoli farm near Limburg, 1962 (2023), features a single broccoli that has been enlarged to absurd proportions, dwarfing the surrounding farm structures. The sheer size of the broccoli disrupts the expectations of realism, making the image feel like a whimsical reimagining of industrial farming, simultaneously humorous and unsettling.
Broccoli farm near Limburg. New Farmer, 2024 © Bruce Eesly.
In a similar vein, Pascal Sgro’s “Cherry Airlines” (2024) fabricates an imagined past - a commercial aviation world built entirely from digital manipulation. By presenting an idealized vision of mid-20th-century air travel, Sgro's work critiques progress and its environmental costs, prompting viewers to question the constructed nature of nostalgia. Brodbeck and de Barbuat’s series Une Histoire Parallèle also takes a distinct approach by using AI to reconstruct and reframe iconic portraits. One notable image reinterprets Annie Leibovitz’s famous photograph of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, swapping their positions—rendering Lennon clothed and Ono nude—thereby exposing both the limitations and the biases inherent in AI-generated narratives. Other works in the series similarly tamper with the historical record, subtly shifting details to provoke a reconsideration of how images shape memory and cultural identity.
Another key focus of AImagine is the evolving role of the photographer. Traditionally, photographers have been seen as storytellers who document the world, but in a machine-assisted era, their function is shifting towards that of a curator or collaborator with AI. Robin Lopvet’s New New York series encapsulates this shift, blending real urban photography with machine-generated alterations, creating a cityscape that is neither entirely real nor completely fabricated. His works revel in playful absurdity, golden French fries the size of subway cars dropped into the street, a giant carrot sprouting in the middle of a group photo, a church steeped in flames while a dog sits on a car window. Lopvet leans into AI’s strange logic, where the mundane and the fantastical coexist, creating a cityscape that is part documentation, part hallucination. This relationship between human intent and machine randomness underscores how technology is not merely replicating photographic practice but actively reshaping it.
The range of approaches among the 18 artists highlights the breadth of inquiry into AI’s role in photography. Some employ AI to reconstruct history, others use it to imagine alternative presents, while some revel in the sheer strangeness of machine-generated forms. The contrast between AI’s ability to generate uncanny realism and its propensity for unsettling errors becomes a focal point: whether in landscapes, portraits, or abstract compositions, the works emphasize both the strengths and limitations of artificial vision. This diversity makes AImagine an exploration of technological progress and a reflection on artistic adaptation in the face of digital transformation. The exhibition runs until June 15, 2025, at Hangar Art.
