Paris Photo: artificial intelligence invites itself to the international photography fair

The international photography fair, Paris Photo, opens its doors on Thursday November 9 in Paris for professionals with a brand new sector dedicated to digital technology and artificial intelligence (AI), always pushing the boundaries of images.

Like the Berlin gallery Office Impart, which exhibits the artist Damjanski, living in New York who has chosen to “explore the concept of applications as works of art”, explains Johanna Neuschäffer to AFP , one of the gallery managers, by revealing “works” made from everyone’s smartphone photos with an AI algorithm. “Thanks to this collaborative technique, each photo of an object, person or scene of life is translated, thanks to an application, into a geometric work of art in bright, tangy colors in the form of an NFT (certified digital art object). unique, Editor’s note) or a physical work in Plexiglas,” she adds.

In the stand opposite, another German gallery, Nagel Draxler, exhibits photos of fictitious places created from images also “digested” by AI software: basketball backboard in a courtyard or photos of neighborhoods urban spaces resembling New York or Paris, are in reality “only places invented from scratch by algorithms from an image bank”, explains one of its representatives.

“Many artists, young and old, are interested in the image on the internet and its developments. They work with AI algorithmic processes, but this is just a technique with which they invent a new artistic language,” says Nina Roehrs, who heads the new digital sector at the fair. Among them, the photograms of the Peruvian Roberto Huarcaya, made without a camera by placing objects or people on a photosensitive surface which he exposes directly to light.

Other gems: the Distortions of André Kertèsz (died in 1985), photos of naked women in black and white reworked in the style of cubism or the cliffs of Bâmiyân in Afghanistan where the giant Buddhas were destroyed in 2001 by the Taliban, reworked by the visual artist Pascal Convert, thanks to thousands of photographic surveys and 3D scans, into a monumental photographic work.

In total, 156 galleries from 24 countries are present at Paris Photo with works from the very beginnings of photography in the 19th century until today, according to Florence Bourgeois, director of the show. The “Elles responsible.