What if our photographic masterpieces were nothing more than memories reinvented by a machine?
With Une Histoire Parallèle (2022), Brodbeck & de Barbuat put artificial intelligence to the test of collective memory. Starting from meticulous descriptions of more than two hundred iconic images — from Man Ray to Dorothea Lange, from Guy Bourdin to Jeff Wall — they pit MidJourney against the mythologies of the history of photography. The generated images resemble the originals yet allow anomalies to surface: misshapen hands, recurring motifs, displaced details. They lay bare the burning issues around AI: appropriation, the dilution of a visual heritage, aesthetic standardisation.
Situated within the long history of image manipulation, from the pre-digital era to today’s generators, the project shows how each innovation reconfigures our perception of the real. Part investigation, part critique, part visual poetry, Une Histoire Parallèle questions the manufacture of a fabricated collective memory and what, irreducibly, constitutes the soul of a photograph.
Published by Heimat
Texts by: Aurélie Cavanna, Michel Poivert and Thibaut Wychowanok
Languages: French and English
25 x 30 × 5.5 cm
448 pages
2025
What if our photographic masterpieces were nothing more than memories reinvented by a machine?
With Une Histoire Parallèle (2022), Brodbeck & de Barbuat put artificial intelligence to the test of collective memory. Starting from meticulous descriptions of more than two hundred iconic images — from Man Ray to Dorothea Lange, from Guy Bourdin to Jeff Wall — they pit MidJourney against the mythologies of the history of photography. The generated images resemble the originals yet allow anomalies to surface: misshapen hands, recurring motifs, displaced details. They lay bare the burning issues around AI: appropriation, the dilution of a visual heritage, aesthetic standardisation.
Situated within the long history of image manipulation, from the pre-digital era to today’s generators, the project shows how each innovation reconfigures our perception of the real. Part investigation, part critique, part visual poetry, Une Histoire Parallèle questions the manufacture of a fabricated collective memory and what, irreducibly, constitutes the soul of a photograph.
Published by Heimat
Texts by: Aurélie Cavanna, Michel Poivert and Thibaut Wychowanok
Languages: French and English
25 x 30 × 5.5 cm
448 pages
2025
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