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  pdftitle={speculative photography},
  pdfauthor={Florian Cramer, Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, Wijnhaven 61, 3011 WJ Rotterdam, The Netherlands, j.j.f.cramer@hr.nl},
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\title{speculative photography}
\author{Florian Cramer, Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam University
of Applied Sciences, Wijnhaven 61, 3011 WJ Rotterdam, The Netherlands,
j.j.f.cramer@hr.nl}
\date{}

\begin{document}
\maketitle

attempt of making visible (= essay \& manifesto)

\hypertarget{abstract}{%
\section{abstract}\label{abstract}}

This essay and manifesto defines speculative photography from a
historical perspective and through a practical poetics, as photography
that integrates fantastic and experimental elements in both its subjects
and processes. Such a photography is all the more urgent at a time when
generative artificial intelligence and computational photography seem to
be leading the whole of photography to a degree zero of fabricated yet
all-pervasive realism.

The text defines speculative photography in its semiotic and information
theoretical 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 tend to be scattered and cover only select aspects
of the broader concept of speculative photography proposed here.
Ultimately, speculative photography rejects empiricism and notions of
truth while practicing an art of the ``medium'' in its most literal --
physical, artistic, and spiritual -- meanings.

\hypertarget{keywords}{%
\subsection{Keywords}\label{keywords}}

photography, speculative, experimental photography, computational
photography, hauntology, aesthetics, Artificial Intelligence, digicam

\hypertarget{cv}{%
\subsection{cv}\label{cv}}

Florian Cramer, practice-oriented research professor at Willem de
Kooning Academy, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, the
Netherlands. Studied Comparative and Art History in Berlin, Konstanz and
Amherst/Massachusetts, lecturer in Comparative Literature 1998-2004, art
school research professor and tutor in Rotterdam since 2004. Recent
publications include: Lumbung, Commons and Community Art, co-authored
with Simon Kentgens, Rotterdam: HumDrumPress, 2023, \emph{A Near-sighted
Falling into Technology: Through the Looking Glass of Art Practice as
Human Self-Experimentation, Accidents and Coincidence}, with Elaine W.
Ho, in: Joke Brouwer \& Sjoerd van Tuinen (eds.), \emph{Technological
Accidents, Accidental Technologies}, Rotterdam: V2\_ Publishing, 2023;
\emph{Making Matters. A Vocabulary for Collective Arts}, edited with
Janneke Wesseling, Anja Groten, Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, Pia Louwerens,
Marie-José Sondeijker, Amsterdam: Valiz, 2022; on speculative
computational poetics: \emph{Words Made Flesh}, Piet Zwart Institute,
2005.

photograph (courtesy Goodiepal, 2022):
\includegraphics{author portrait/florian-portrait-3.jpg}

{[}Body text:{]}

\hypertarget{demands}{%
\section{demands}\label{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{photography point zero}\label{photography-point-zero}}

As a result of techno-aesthetic developments culminating in
computational photography\ldots{}

\begin{quote}
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, based on aesthetic
norms coded into the camera software; this is now the standard mode of
operation of mobile phone photography, and thus of the majority of
today's photography
\end{quote}

\ldots and photorealistic image generation with generative AI software,
photography seems to have reached its degree zero. To riff on Roland
Barthes' characterization of realistic prose novelism, photography has
thus ``passed through all the stages of progressive solidification'' to
settle in ``neutral modes'' characterized by ``the absence of all
signs'' (Barthes 1990, 5).

Photography's degree zero is photorealism. 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 in (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 from any obligation to actually go to
church and involuntarily executing the ``Six Finger Plan'' of the DIY
subculture of Neoism in the 1980s.

As algorithms continue to be optimized, this remaining
fantastic-speculative quality of AI machine learning-based computational
photography and generative imaging is likely to disappear. It has
already diminished considerably in the version advancements of AI image
generators such as Stable Diffusion and Midjourney in the last 1½ years.
Furthermore, AI researchers and developers expect computational
photography and generative AI to eventually merge, 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: ``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) iconocity. 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), similar to 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 daguerrotype, chemical film emulsion, the sensels of an electronic
camera sensor). The trompe l'oeil of photography was based on human
perception registering this indexicality as photorealist iconocity,
similar to how human reading is persuaded into reading the
abstract-alphabetical symbols of a (realist) novel as mimetic depiction
of social reality. In this sense, photography has always been illusion
and hallucination, just like novels, and long before computational
photography. As every photographer knows, photorealism itself is a myth
created by lensing (focal length and lens characteristics), spatial
framing, choice of moment, aperture, shutter speed, exposure,
processing, reproduction, publishing, and, since computing, the
Internet: semantic tagging and databasing that made images data and
objects of algorithmic ``analytics,'' which ultimately amounted to the
datasets for AI machine learning.

Computational photography and generative AI imaging is 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.

In this post-histoire of photography (and writing), photography needs a
time machine that travels in all directions at once, fusing the
\emph{ars magna lucis et umbrae} with imagined futures.

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

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{]};

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 Thomas'
  formalist experiments have, through their 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{}
attribute & tag \\
\midrule\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 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
  the exposure, destruction, and reimagination of film materiality and
  the optical apparatus in the early filmmaking of Wilhelm \& Birgit
  Hein (\emph{Rohfilm} \& \emph{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 \emph{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
    as a ``worldwide community of modern users of forgotten point and
    shoot digital cameras'' on its website, and is active on the social
    media platforms Instagram and Discord.} {[}a{]} {[}i{]} {[}n{]}
  {[}t{]}
\end{itemize}

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

Since the late 1970s, the term ``speculative photography'' has been used
in rather scattered ways by various critics and scholars. (Trachtenberg,
1978, 857) evokes the kinship of the Latin word ``speculatio''
(mirroring) with the Greek ``theoria'' (way of seeing) and refers to
Heidegger and the early André Glucksmann in hoping for a ``truly
speculative photography'' by ``photographers who are also critics
(skeptics). Contemporary artist (Buzzo, 2018), on the other hand, calls
his photographic digital media experiments with augmented reality
technology''speculative photography.''

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.''\footnote{(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 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 or the ``ecriture'' of a text -- i.e.~to
what is being told, not how it is told --, thus echoing what Barthes
found in social realist novels.

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

The following quote is from the \emph{Aesthetics Wiki} (Anonoymous,
Fotonight Web, 2024), which grew out of popular, often
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 underground secret base, which had
aliens and nuclear weapons. Later, he stumbled across an old Asian man
talking about `Fotonight Web', alongside a 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 internet culture such as Xpiritualism and Shanzhai. Shanzhai in
particular emphasizes the counterfeit, imitation, or parody products
aspect of Fotonight Web.''
\end{quote}

The Reddit user williamsaguaro2002 is most likely identical to the DIY
electronic musician William Saguaro, who released the album
\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 ``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 documentation of its immediate
predecessor, \emph{Frutiger Aero} (a reference to Adrian Frutiger's
1950s sans-serif typeface and its popularity in mid-2000s advertising),
on the \emph{Aesthetics Wiki} is 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.'' The \emph{Aesthetics Wiki} has 993 different
entries on 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 Consumer Aesthetics Research
Institute'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,
  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 often 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 processing -- especially the
operation of debayering (i.e., the reconstruction of full color from
monochrome red/green/blue sensor raster pixels through interpolation
algorithms) -- and special properties believed to exist in obsoleted
imaging technology such as CCD camera sensors, takes on speculative,
hauntological and spirit-photographic qualities by creating image
artifacts that are outside of pictorial representation and embedded in a
larger, often fantastical, pop-cultural imaginary, such as the dream of
the underground secret base of the Disney animation studio.

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

Working with the apparatus as a speculative device, with its grain,
texture, flares (= noise, in Claude Shannon's broad sense), but neither
with technical mastery nor romanticism; as subjectvity, but not as the
photographic subject; this may be the difference between speculative and
experimental photography.

Speculative photography disputes the concept of truth in photography. It
rejects both the idea that there can be truth of depiction and or that
truth lies in the apparatus or 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 speculative photography in their use of the fisheye lens
and anamorphic optical projection. It is the birth of photography
through the Mannerist lens, where the ``maniera'' itself is the
optically elongated hand. The ``aesthetic'' of Fotonight Web (next to
\emph{2K1}, \emph{2K7}, \emph{Abstract Tech}, \emph{Anime New Moon},
\emph{Bright Tertiaries}, \emph{Captchacore}, \emph{Cheiron Crush},
\emph{Chromecore}, \emph{Cleancore}, \emph{Corporate Memphis},
\emph{Cybercore}, \emph{Cyber Glacier}, \emph{Cyberparadism},
\emph{Cyberprep}, \emph{Dark Aero}, \emph{Dollar Store Vernacular},
\emph{DORFic}, \emph{Dreamcore}, \emph{ElectroPop 08}, \emph{Frutiger
Aero}, \emph{Frutiger Aurora}, \emph{Frutiger Eco}, \emph{Frutiger
Metro}, \emph{Funky Seasons}, \emph{Gamercore}, \emph{Gen X Soft Club},
\emph{Glassmorphism}, \emph{Helvetica Aqua Aero}, \emph{Hexatron},
\emph{Holo}, \emph{Holosexual}, \emph{Home 2K}, \emph{Hyperpop},
\emph{Icepunk}, \emph{Imaginarium}, \emph{Indie Sleaze}, \emph{Liminal
Space}, \emph{McBling}, \emph{Memphis Design}, \emph{Minivan Rock},
\emph{Musica Metro}, \emph{Neumorphism}, \emph{Nintencore},
\emph{Nostalgiacore}, \emph{Rainbowcore}, \emph{Renewable Corporate
Futurism}, \emph{Robotcore}, \emph{Seapunk}, \emph{Shibuya Punk}, ,
\emph{Solarpunk}, \emph{Superflat Pop}, \emph{Surf Crush},
\emph{Technoneko2000}, \emph{Technozen}, \emph{Trillwave},
\emph{Tropical}, \emph{UrBling}, \emph{Vaporwave}, \emph{Vectorbloom},
\emph{Vectorflourish}, \emph{Vectorgarden}, \emph{Weirdcore},
\emph{Xpiritualism}, \emph{Zen Tranquility})\footnote{List taken from
  (Anonymous, Frutiger Aero, 2024).} boils down to a maniera, and so it
is a poetics at the same time.

If speculative photography combines structural investigation with the
fantastic -- making structures fantastic and the fantastic structural --
then it is a medium in the most literal sense of the word (much more so
than what otherwise is being referred to as ``media''):

\begin{itemize}
\tightlist
\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 \emph{speculative fiction, as
mutant epistemology}.\footnote{Riffing on the definition of
  ``speculative software'' in (Fuller 2003, 30): ``software as science
  fiction, as mutant epistemology''.}

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

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 thus define
photography. Like other seeming ``media,'' such as the book -- whose
form has morphed from scrolls to codex and now includes e-books and
audiobooks --, photography turns out to be defined not by a particular
technology but by cultural conventions and perceptive expectations of
what a photograph should look like. Following and extending Ernst
Cassirer and Erwin Panofsky, photography (as well as books) might be
called a symbolic form rather than a specific medium or information
technology. Computational photography and generative AI are thus
solidifying the degree zero of photography -- of representational
smoothness and slickness -- in the same way that social realism
established the degree zero of the novel. (This means that while
\emph{photography degree zero} is being championed by AI imaging
technology, it does not need it. Any photography that strives to erase
its textures and ruptures fits its definition.)

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

(With special and heartfelt thanks to Sofia Lee for teaching me about
digicam/aesthetic subculture and for suggesting corrections to related
parts of this essay.)

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

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\end{document}
