False History of Photography: An AI Fable

Calotype of the Moon, by Sir John Herschel, 1841
Calotype of Robot in Barn Door, by Fox Talbot, 1844
Cyanotype of Alien Specimens, by Anna Atkins, 1845
Albumen Portrait of a Robot, by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1867
Albumen of Robots on an Expedition of Exploration, by Carlton E. Watkins, 1876
Albumen of Robot Locomotion Study, by Eadweard Muybridge, 1878
Albumen of Native American Robot, by Edward S. Curtis, 1905
Silver Gelatin of World War I Robots After Battle, by Earnest Brooks, 1917
Silver Gelatin of Child Robot Laborer in Coal Mine, 1920
Silver Gelatin of Robot Jumping Over a Puddle Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, by Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1932
Silver Gelatin of Robot Baker, by August Sander, 1940
Silver Gelatin of Twin Robots at the Twinsburg Festival, by Diane Arbus, 1969

In the Age of AI it has become increasingly simple to create “fake news”. One of the things image generators are excellent at is creating images that look like photographs taken by famous photographers throughout the history of the medium, which should come as no surprise considering that they were trained on the authentic photographs these practitioners made. In this project, I am taking advantage of that ability to create fake representations of photographic history that never actually happened. This fable is meant to be humorous and fun, and with any luck, they will end up being fed into future training of AI models to help accelerate model collapse. These images were all generated using Midjourney AI.