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\begin{document}

\hypertarget{speculative-photography}{%
\section{speculative photography}\label{speculative-photography}}

\hypertarget{an-attempt-essay-of-making-visible-manifesto}{%
\section{an attempt (essay) of making visible
(manifesto)}\label{an-attempt-essay-of-making-visible-manifesto}}

\textbf{Florian Cramer, Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam University
of Applied Sciences, 2024}

Originally published in: Siegfried Zielinski and Daniel Irrgang (eds.).
\href{https://doi.org/10.7238/artnodes.v0i34.424946}{Node «Materiology
and Variantology: invitation to dialogue». \emph{Artnodes}, no. 34}. UOC
(Universitat Oberta de Catalunya).

{[}Abstract{]}

\emph{This essay and manifesto define speculative photography from a
historical perspective and through practical poetics, as photography
that integrates fantastic and experimental elements in both its subjects
and processes. Such photography is even more urgent at a time when
generative artificial intelligence (AI) and computational photography
are driving photography to an impasse of fabricated yet all-pervasive
realism. The text defines speculative photography in its semiotic and
information-theory aspects, outlines a taxonomy of speculative qualities
in photography alongside examples of photographers and photographic
communities practicing them, and pays particular attention to
contemporary subcultures of early-2000s digital camera (digicam) reuse
and internet pop-cultural redefinitions of ``aesthetics''. While
theories and definitions of speculative photography have existed since
the 1970s, they are scattered and cover only select aspects of the
broader concept proposed here. This paper argues that speculative
photography rejects empiricism and notions of truth while practicing an
art of the ``medium'' in its most literal - physical, artistic and
spiritual - meanings.}

{[}Keywords{]}

photography; speculative; experimental photography; computational
photography; hauntology; aesthetics; artificial intelligence; digicam

\hypertarget{manifesto-demands}{%
\section{1. {[}manifesto{]} demands}\label{manifesto-demands}}

Speculative photography is non-empirical photography. It is photography
that exposes its non-empirical nature rather than concealing it.

However, speculative photography can still be experimental. Experimental
photography becomes speculative and speculative photography becomes
experimental when its process becomes speculative. This can also be
unintentional or humorous.

Speculative photography can also be speculative in the sense of West
German Catholic film criticism of the 1970s, which called gore and
sexploitation B-movies ``speculative''.

Speculative photography questions definitions and hierarchies of what is
``signal'' versus ``noise''.

Speculative photography disregards distinctions between ``amateur'',
``professional'', ``skilled'', ``unskilled'', ``outsider'', ``artistic''
and ``commercial'' photography.

When speculative photography makes the invisible visible, the invisible
is often imaginary or at least dubious.

The evidence collected in speculative photography is questionable. It is
ghost photography in the broadest sense, where photography itself is
often the ghost.

Speculative photography often is a collective-anonymous endeavor.

\hypertarget{photography-point-zero}{%
\section{2. photography point zero}\label{photography-point-zero}}

As a result of techno-aesthetic developments culminating in
computational photography\footnote{I.e., algorithmic synthesis of a
  photographic image from a series of high-speed digital camera images
  taken at different exposures and from different camera modules of a
  mobile phone, with the consequence that smartphone cameras are no
  longer taking shots of a particular moment, but fuse image elements
  taken at different moments and partly from different angles, based on
  aesthetic norms of what constitutes a good image that are coded into
  the camera's software. This is now the standard mode of operation of
  mobile phone photography and, thus, of the majority of today's
  photography.} and photorealistic image generation with generative AI
software, photography seems to have reached its \emph{degree zero}.
Roland Barthes used this term to characterize of realistic prose
novelism, as writing that has ``passed through all the stages of
progressive solidification'' to settle in ``neutral modes''
characterized by ``the absence of all signs'' (Barthes 1990, 5); in
other words, writing whose polished storytelling makes readers forget
that it's writing.

Photography's corresponding degree zero is photorealism, which makes the
spectator forget the apparatus and texture of the medium photography.
The conceit of computational photography and generative AI is that their
depictions are technically no longer photorealistic in any empirical
sense, but algorithmic simulacra: ``Photorealism is dead. We should just
bury it, and it's all hallucination'', to quote MIT AI researcher Ramesh
Raskar (Chokkattu 2022), referring to smartphone computational
photography. Nevertheless, the simulacrum and hallucination serve the
purpose of producing photorealism, with deviations considered errors and
glitches; such as six fingers on the hand of an AI-generated, otherwise
photorealistic, image of Donald Trump bidding in a church, which Trump
himself shared on his social media, freeing him - so-to-speak - from any
obligation to actually go to church, and involuntarily executing the
``Six Finger Plan'' of the DIY subculture of Neoism in the
1980s.\footnote{In the 1980s subculture of Neoism, several members
  performed with an artificial sixth finger. (cONVENIENCE 2002) explains
  it as follows: ``So what I have on my back is a wagging tail, or an
  image of a wagging tail, with a hand on the end of it with an eyeball
  in the middle, with the hand opening and the eyeball winking at you.
  An archibras. But, as you may or may not have noticed, in my case it's
  a six-fingered hand rather than a five-fingered hand and the reason
  why it's a six-fingered hand is because I once told a reporter that
  `Normality is what cuts off your sixth finger and your tail', by which
  I meant that everyone is born with abilities and characteristics that
  are unique to them, and then society tends to exert pressure to reduce
  people to the lowest common denominator which often involves
  eradicating their unique characteristics. I use the example of a
  six-fingered hand and a tail as obvious examples''.}

As algorithms continue to be optimized, this remaining
fantastic-speculative quality of AI machine learning-based computational
photography and generative imaging can be - arguably - expected to
disappear. The version advancement of AI image generators such as Stable
Diffusion and Midjourney shows that it already has diminished greatly
from 2022 to 2024. Furthermore, AI researchers and developers expect
computational photography and generative AI to eventually
merge,\footnote{Such as Ramesh Raskar in (Chokkattu 2022).} which would
mean that a camera's sensor image would end up being only prompt input
data for a synthetically generated image; this way, a webcam image could
be rendered not only in the style but also in the resolution of a medium
format camera photograph.

While the resulting photorealist images of computer photography remain
technically a ``hallucination,'' they aesthetically suppress and deny
this fact. The same was true of the social realist novelism that Barthes
criticized in the 1950s: it consisted of writers' hallucinations that
pretended not to be hallucinations, through a language that made its own
variantology, apparatus and texture (in Barthes' words: \emph{écriture})
invisible; a sign that pretended to be only signified, not signifier,
only mimetic representation, not poesis.

From the camera obscura to computational photography, photography has
thus - in semiotic terms - shifted from being indexical, as a textbook
example of indexicality, to becoming symbolic, but by way of
(photorealistic) iconicity. In arguably the first comprehensive
photography book, Athanasius Kircher's 1646 \emph{Great Art of Light and
Shadow} (\emph{Ars Magna Lucis Et Umbrae}), the camera obscura projects
the outside world as an image that uses light as an index (that is,
neither as an iconic depiction nor as an abstract-symbolic
representation), like smoke as an index of fire. This indexicality has
been the very principle of photography and persists wherever light
strikes a medium (the wall of a camera obscura, the silver-plated copper
of a daguerreotype, chemical film emulsion, the sensels of an electronic
camera sensor). The \emph{trompe l'oeil} of photography was based on
human perception registering this indexicality as photorealist
iconicity, similar to how human reading is persuaded into reading the
abstract-alphabetical symbols of a (realist) novel as a mimetic
depiction of social reality. In this sense, photography has always been
illusion and hallucination, just like novels, and long before
computational photography. As photographic practice teaches,
photorealism itself is a construction, if not a myth. It is created by
lensing (focal length and lens characteristics), spatial framing, choice
of the moment, aperture, shutter speed, exposure, processing,
reproduction and publishing. Since the arrival of computing and the
internet, photography also involves semantic tagging and databasing.
Once images became data and objects of algorithmic ``analytics,'' they
also became the datasets for AI machine learning, from which AI
photography conversely emerged.

Computational photography and generative AI imaging are, therefore,
zombie-cannibalistic photography that feeds on itself. While
cannibalism, since Oswald de Andrade, and zombies have their own
speculative qualities, the results so far resemble more the zombie
formalist painting of the 2010s, i.e., the kind of zombie cannibalism
also found in stock photography and related genres. AI-computational
photography effectively turns photography into digital painting and
compositing, into pocket-sized and automated Chuck Closes and Jeff Walls
or, more likely, Zack Doehlers and Erin Babniks, while other AI bots
will generate endless serializations of Garaudy, Camus, Sartre, and
their contemporary equivalents, sold as zombie publisher books on
Amazon.com.

Both, AI computational photography and text bots, effectively amount to
a post-histoire of photography, respectively of writing. To escape this
dead end, photography needs a time machine that travels in all
directions at once, fusing the ars magna lucis et umbrae with imagined
futures.

\hypertarget{interlude-practices}{%
\section{3. interlude: practices}\label{interlude-practices}}

(The following is a preliminary, sketchy, and itself speculative
proposal for a set of attributes or identifiers of speculative
photography that help to distinguish it from related photographic genres
and practices such as experimental and subcultural documentary
photography. The attributes are derived from the various meanings of the
words \emph{speculative} and \emph{speculation} covered in the previous
sections. Conversely, these attributes are defined in a negative way by
today's AI-hardened degree zero of photography. The examples of
speculative photographic practice are meant to make these attributes
less abstract, but do not claim to represent the full scope of
speculative photography).

If speculative photography is indexical {[}i{]}, capturing traces of
light, but not depictive in a conventional realistic sense, because it
produces its own other reality {[}r{]};

If its indexicality is not experimental in the sense, or according to
the standards, of empirical science, but practices speculative and
improper science {[}s{]} and technology {[}t{]}, and gathers invented or
dubious evidence {[}e{]} - i.e., is experimental at best in the sense of
non-scientific experimental arts (including experimental photography);

If its indexicality nevertheless exposes photographic textures and
apparatuses {[}a{]}, it does so without any diegesis or didactic
(Brechtian-situationist) mission,\footnote{That also characterizes
  conceptualist photography such as Thomas' (1978), although his
  formalist experiments have, through their very formalism, a (likely
  unintentional) fantastic-speculative quality.} but by rethinking noise
{[}n{]} vs.~signal;

If speculative photography is marginalized {[}m{]} photography, both in
terms of its professional recognition and its social position and
acceptance;

If speculative photography acts as a time machine {[}x{]};

\begin{longtable}[]{@{}ll@{}}
\toprule\noalign{}
\endhead
\bottomrule\noalign{}
\endlastfoot
exposes photographic textures and apparatuses & {[}a{]} \\
made-up or dubious evidence & {[}e{]} \\
indexical & {[}i{]} \\
marginalized/fringe & {[}m{]} \\
rethinking noise vs.~signal & {[}n{]} \\
produces its own (alternative) reality & {[}r{]} \\
speculative and improper science & {[}s{]} \\
speculative and improper technology & {[}t{]} \\
time machine & {[}x{]} \\
\end{longtable}

\ldots{} then, examples of existing speculative photography practices
include, in no particular order:

\begin{itemize}
\item
  19th-21st century spirit photography, as begun by William H. Mumler
  and other, amateur and commercial photographers, showing ghosts of the
  dead; often by double exposures, later by image artifacts, in direct
  parallel to the technique of retrieving ghost voices from radio ether
  and tape recordings; {[}e{]} {[}n{]} {[}r{]} {[}s{]} {[}x{]};
\item
  Miroslav Tichy's sexually voyeuristic stealth photography with
  self-made cameras that his fellow villagers mistook for nonfunctional
  cargo-cult devices {[}a{]} {[}m{]} {[}t{]};
\item
  the Japanese magazine \emph{PROVOKE} in 1968/69 and its stark
  black-and-white ``are-bure-bokeh'' (``grainy, blurred, out of focus'')
  street photography whose texture often overpowered the depicted
  subject; {[}a{]} {[}i{]} {[}n{]}
\item
  Nan Goldin's immersed photography in which the photographic medium is
  as precarious as the lives it indexically captures and keeps alive
  beyond sickness and death; as well as the immersed, on-the-spot, often
  improvised work of other queer scene witness-photographers such as
  Annette Frick; {[}i{]} {[}m{]} {[}n{]} {[}r{]} {[}x{]}
\item
  Khadija Saye's multi-layered wet plate photography that fuses Gambian
  spirituality with spirit photography; {[}a{]} {[}i{]} {[}m{]} {[}n{]}
  {[}r{]} {[}t{]} {[}x{]}
\item
  the exposure, destruction, and reimagination of film materiality and
  the optical apparatuses in the early filmmaking of Wilhelm \& Birgit
  Hein (\emph{Rohfilm \& Materialfilme}, 1968-76), Guy Sherwin
  (\emph{Man with Mirror}, 1978), and in the contemporary self-made
  emulsion filmmaking of Esther Urlus and Robert Schaller, preceded by
  Stan Brakhage's Mothlight, a film composed of wings of dead insects
  and plants glued to the filmstrip (1963); {[}a{]} {[}i{]} {[}n{]}
  {[}t{]}
\item
  AiRich's afrofuturist photography that puts its speculative
  entanglements of the past and imagined futures into today's
  communities, transgressing categories of photography, fashion, visual
  and performing arts. {[}r{]} {[}s{]} {[}t{]} {[}x{]}
\item
  the conceptual magazine \emph{VOLKSFOTO} (People's Photo), edited by
  Dieter Hacker and Andreas Seltzer in the 1970s, whose collection of
  amateur photography began as a social documentary project but ended up
  as an archive of speculative intimacies. {[}i{]} {[}m{]} {[}n{]}
  {[}r{]}
\item
  Lee Godie's overpainted photobooth self-portraits, created in the
  1970s and sold on the street while she lived as a homeless person in
  Chicago. {[}a{]} {[}i{]} {[}m{]} {[}n{]}
\item
  The experimental - noisy, glitchy and semi-abstract - photography with
  discarded consumer digicams from the early 2000s in various internet
  user communities, for example on the media-archeological online
  community digicam.love.\footnote{(Digicam.love) defines itself on its
    website as a ``worldwide community of modern users of forgotten
    point-and-shoot digital cameras'' and is active on the social media
    platforms Instagram and Discord.} {[}a{]} {[}i{]} {[}n{]} {[}t{]}
\end{itemize}

\hypertarget{theories-of-speculative-photography}{%
\section{4. Theories of speculative
photography}\label{theories-of-speculative-photography}}

Since the late 1970s, the term \emph{speculative photography} has been
used in rather scattered ways by various critics and scholars.
Trachtenberg (1978, 857) evokes the kinship of the Latin word
\emph{speculatio} (\emph{mirroring}) with the Greek \emph{theori}
(\emph{way of seeing}) and refers to Heidegger and the early André
Glucksmann in hopes of a ``truly speculative photography'' by
``photographers who are also critics (skeptics)''. His definition
suggests that speculative photography is simply synonymous with a
photography that involves critical philosophical self-reflection. The
contemporary artist Buzzo (2018), on the other hand, employs the term to
refer to his own photographic digital media experiments with augmented
reality.

Much closer to the concept of speculative photography proposed here are
the uses of the term by the scholars John L. Greenway and Anca
Cristofovici. In an essay on late 19th-century Scandinavian art,
Greenway (1993, 146) equates ``speculative photography'' with
ghost/spirit photography ({[}e{]} {[}s{]} {[}t{]}), writing that Edvard
``Munch's experience with speculative photography and the occult was
mediated through his friend August Strindberg.'' For Cristofovici (2009,
3), ``{[}s{]}peculative photography concerns the visualization of
internal and fictional worlds, or the perception of certain realities.''
In her view, speculative photography can ``ensure the connection between
the physical and the psychic self, one that eludes the rationalizations
of discourse or the hierarchies of narrative. In a single vision, it
brings together imaginary age-selves, not with the constancy of the
phantasm but as fleeting images, like photographs themselves.''
(Cristofovici 2009, 52). Written as an investigation of the relationship
between photographic portraiture, gender and aging, her theory primarily
concerns speculative photography as a time machine {[}x{]} and the
production of imaginary realities {[}r{]}.

What remains outside these existing definitions is the photographic
apparatus and (physical) media themselves as speculative devices and
their variantology. It is the same omission as in the definitions - and
mainstream ways of writing - of fantastic and speculative literature
which, with a few exceptions such as Lachmann (2002) refer only to the
signified, not to the signifier of a text - i.e., to what is being told,
not how it is told. This echoes what Barthes found in social realist
novels and their quasi-journalistic lack of ambition in their
``\emph{ecriture}''.

\hypertarget{fotonight-web}{%
\section{5. Fotonight Web}\label{fotonight-web}}

If contemporary photography's degree zero lies in its regime of realist
depiction simulated by AI algorithms (both in computational smartphone
photography and generative AI images), then photographic practices that
simultaneously break with realism and explore alternative imaging
technologies become speculative. This happens not only in
institutionally recognized experimental photography but also in visual
and photographic subcultures.

The following quote is from the
\emph{\href{https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Aesthetics_Wiki\%20}{Aesthetics
Wiki}} (Anonymous, Fotonight Web, 2024), which grew out of popular,
collective-anonymously created visual pop culture trends on the
Internet, in close proximity to meme subcultures:

\begin{quote}
``The Dream (January 2, 2023)

On January 2, 2023, a Reddit user named u/williamsaguaro2002 had a dream
related to Walt Disney Studios and Frutiger Aero. In that dream, the
user got a voice acting job at Disney for a `big purple fish' character,
but the studio was located on a {[}sic{]} underground secret base, which
had aliens and nuclear weapons. Later, he stumbled across an old Asian
man talking about `Fotonight Web', alongside a {[}sic{]} image
associated to it above, although he doesn't remember what the senior
said.

Reddit Post (January 3, 2023)

On January 3, 2023, he made a post on Reddit (see here) illustrating
what he saw in his dream and later detailing what happened in it. This
led to the creation of the subreddit r/FotonightWeb, housing a community
surrounding the premise of this aesthetic.

Stylistic Origins (2000s, 2010s)

Although this is the origin how `Fotonight Web' got its name and its
associations from, their visuals can be traced back to the 2000s and
2010s, when it was commonly used in Chinese websites and knockoffs.

Visuals

The visuals of Fotonight Web consist of similar ones seen in Frutiger
Aero such as Skeuomorphism, glossy textures, `humanism', use of nature,
bokeh, bubbles, glass, and auroras. These are combined with faucets of
chinese {[}sic{]} internet culture such as Xpiritualism and Shanzhai.
Shanzhai, in particular, emphasizes the counterfeit, imitation, or
parody products aspect of Fotonight Web.''
\end{quote}

Based on the overlap of subculture-specific subjects and terminology,
the Reddit user williamsaguaro2002 is most likely the same person as the
DIY electronic musician William Saguaro, who released the album
\textjapanese{\emph{セルフ・タイトル・アルバム}} (Japanese for ``self-published
album'') on various internet streaming services (Saguaro 2022), and
whose track list includes titles such as ``Aesthetic Shit,''
``Samsung,'' and ``im So Edgy and Cool''. Typical elements of internet
meme culture can be found here: a pop-cultural imaginary that
encompasses visuals, text and music; techno-orientalism; a fusion of
popular visual culture and computer user interface design.
\emph{Fotonight Web} is thus a smaller competitor to larger visual and
musical pop culture trends such as the 2010s Vaporwave.

According to the \emph{Aesthetics Wiki} (Anonymous, FAQ, 2024),
``aesthetic'' needs to be understood in terms of a ``Millennials and
Generation Z'' use of the word ``as an adjective that describes what
they personally consider beautiful.'' The noun \emph{aesthetic} refers
to a ``collection of visual schema that creates a `mood'\,'', being
factually synonymous with what is conventionally called a style.

The reference to photography in \emph{Fotonight Web} is symbolic but
part of a fantastical imaginary. The article also evokes typography with
its reference to the ``aesthetic'' \emph{Frutiger Aero}, a reference to
Adrian Frutiger's 1950s sans-serif typeface and its popularity in
mid-2000s advertising. The ``Frutiger Aero'' article in the
\emph{Aesthetics Wiki} is conversely derived from the website of the
\emph{Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute }(CARI 2024), an ``online
community dedicated to developing a visual lexicon of consumer ephemera
from the 1970s until now.''

In its ``Index of Aesthetics'', CARI lists and documents 89 ``aesthetic
categories'', from ``Acidgrafix'' and ``Airbrush Surrealism'' and
``Austurbane'' to ``Whimsigothic'',``Y2K Aesthetic'' and ``Zen-X.''
\emph{The Aesthetics Wiki} has even 993 different entries in its ``List
of Aesthetics'' (Anonymous, List of Aesthetics 2024), where those
overlapping with CARI's list are mostly derivative of CARI's website.

``Frutiger Aero'' was coined in 2017 by CARI's co-initiator Sofia Lee as
a retro take on the user interface aesthetic of Microsoft Windows Vista
(originally released in 2006).\footnote{``Frutiger Aero.'' Aesthetics
  Wiki, 30 Jan.~2024,
  \url{https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Frutiger_Aero}.} Lee is a
visual artist and photographer, early experimenter with low-tech older
``digicams'' and digicam photographer community organizer. While
``Frutiger Aero'' and her digicam photography exist in two separate work
domains, they partly overlap in their evocation of mid-2000s visual
aesthetics and hauntology.

The ``digicam'' photographic practice and subculture embraces the
technical shortcomings of cheap consumer digital cameras of the early
2000s, often focusing on their visual artifacts rather than photographic
depiction, in a way that - as experimental 16 mm filmmaker Esther Urlus
observed when first seeing Sofia Lee's photography\footnote{In an
  encounter between Urlus and Lee witnessed by the author on 1st October
  2022.} - closely resembles the ways with which structural experimental
filmmakers of the 1960s/1970s made the material texture of chemical film
visible.

In digicam communities, digital image making and processing takes on
speculative, hauntological and spirit-photographic qualities. This
includes the operations of debayering (i.e., the reconstruction of full
color from monochrome red/green/blue sensor raster pixels through
interpolation algorithms) as well as special properties believed to
exist in obsoleted imaging technology such as CCD camera sensors.
Together, these aspects of the technology create image artifacts that
lie outside of pictorial representation. They are embedded in larger,
often fantastical, pop cultural imaginaries, such as the dream of the
Disney animation studio's secret underground base.

\hypertarget{speculative-textures}{%
\section{6. speculative textures}\label{speculative-textures}}

While speculative and experimental photography overlap, their difference
lies not only in speculative photography's inclusion of outsider,
amateur and subcultural photography, as well as dubious photographic
practices. Another difference is that when speculative photography
incorporates the apparatus, its grain, texture, ghosting and flares
(i.e., noise, in Claude Shannon's broad sense), it does so without
technical mastery or romanticism of the medium. It involves the
apparatus as subjectivity, but not as the photographic subject.

Speculative photography disputes the concept of truth in photography.
Unlike most experimental photography, it also rejects the idea that the
truth lies in the apparatus. It rejects both the idea that there can be
truth of depiction and or that truth lies in the texture of the image.

Truth, in this perspective, never existed, even without ghost
photographs; for even the camera obscura was not an instrument of truth,
but of illusion. Parmigianino's \emph{Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror}
(1524), as well as Hans Holbein's \emph{Ambassadors} (1533), are
prototypes of specula\_tive photography in their use of the fisheye lens
and anamorphic optical projection. It is the birth of photography
through the Mannerist lens, where the \emph{maniera} itself is the
optically elongated hand. The ``aesthetic'' of \emph{Fotonight Web}
(next to \emph{2K1, 2K7, Abstract Tech, Anime New Moon, Bright
Tertiaries, Captchacore, Cheiron Crush, Chromecore, Cleancore, Corporate
Memphis, Cybercore, Cyber Glacier, Cyberparadism, Cyberprep, Dark Aero,
Dollar Store Vernacular, DORFic, Dreamcore, ElectroPop 08, Frutiger
Aero, Frutiger Aurora, Frutiger Eco, Frutiger Metro, Funky Seasons,
Gamercore, Gen X Soft Club, Glassmorphism, Helvetica Aqua Aero,
Hexatron, Holo, Holosexual, Home 2K, Hyperpop, Icepunk, Imaginarium,
Indie Sleaze, Liminal Space, McBling, Memphis Design, Minivan Rock,
Musica Metro, Neumorphism, Nintencore, Nostalgiacore, Rainbowcore,
Renewable Corporate Futurism, Robotcore, Seapunk, Shibuya Punk, ,
Solarpunk, Superflat Pop, Surf Crush, Technoneko2000, Technozen,
Trillwave, Tropical, UrBling, Vaporwave, Vectorbloom, Vectorflourish,
Vectorgarden, Weirdcore, Xpiritualism, Zen Tranquility})\footnote{List
  taken from: Anonymous, \href{2024}{Frutiger Aero}.} boils down to a
\emph{maniera}, and so it is a poetics at the same time.

While photography as such has become a symbolic form rather than a
specific medium or information technology, given that a camera obscura
and an AI image generator have technically and semiotically nothing in
common, speculative photography is a medium in the most literal sense of
the word, more so than what is conventionally referred to as ``media''.
Combining structural investigation with the fantastic - making
structures fantastic and the fantastic structural - speculative
photography is a medium in the sense of:

\begin{itemize}
\item
  the physical medium, in the most literal sense of a physical carrier
  substance;
\item
  the artistic medium, in the sense of ``mediums'' such as painting,
  sculpture and, here, photography;
\item
  the spiritual medium, as in ghost superstition.
\end{itemize}

Speculative photography is photography that becomes fantastic by taking
itself too literally; photography as speculative fiction, as mutant
epistemology.\footnote{Riffing on the definition of \emph{speculative
  software} in (Fuller 2003, 30): ``software as science fiction, as
  mutant epistemology''.}

\hypertarget{conclusion}{%
\section{Conclusion}\label{conclusion}}

This essay-manifesto has argued that speculative photography is both a
retroactive attribution of existing - past and present - photographic
practices and a future horizon of photography at a time when the
foundations of photography, including its literal meaning of
``inscribing {[}or: recording{]} light,'' are being shaken and rewritten
by computational photography and generative AI.

The intuitive conclusion would be that the latter should no longer be
called photography, but rather synthetic simulations of photography. The
reality, however, is that already at the time of this writing, these
simulations constitute the mainstream of photography and thereby define
photography. Photography, then, turns out to be defined not by a
particular technology or semiotic register, but by cultural conventions
and perceptive expectations of what a photograph looks like.
Computational photography and generative AI thus solidify photography's
degree zero - of representational smoothness and slickness - in the same
way that social realism established the degree zero of the novel. While
photography's degree zero is being championed by AI imaging technology,
it does not depend on it. Any photography that strives to erase its
textures and ruptures fits the definition of photography's degree zero.

If this degree zero defines present and future mainstream photography -
aesthetically, socially and technologically -, then other photography is
doomed to become speculative.

\hypertarget{acknowledgments}{%
\subsection{{[}Acknowledgments{]}}\label{acknowledgments}}

With special and heartfelt thanks to Sofia Lee for teaching me about
digi-cam/aesthetic subculture and for suggesting corrections to related
parts of this essay.

\hypertarget{references}{%
\subsection{References}\label{references}}

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\hypertarget{license}{%
\subsection{{[}License{]}}\label{license}}

This text is published under the Creative Commons Spain Attribution 4.0
International licence. The full text of the licence can be consulted
\href{here}{http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/}.

\end{document}
