What happens when a photograph not only preserves a moment but also evokes pain? How can a visual memory support the process of grieving—whether we are facing personal loss or collective trauma? Photography does more than document; it creates a bridge between past and present, individual and community, personal and historical wounds.
Discourses on photography attribute several functions to the medium, including artistic self-expression, documentation, experimentation, illustration, and the preservation of memory. This latter function, however, is discussed less frequently and appears even less often in public discourse, although in modern art history the relationship between photography and memory plays a decisive role in shaping both the creation of images and their afterlife. The photographs preserved in family albums help safeguard the memories of individual lives, while archival image material can bring entire historical periods to light. What accounts for the particularly close relationship between photography and memory? Can photography’s memory-preserving function survive in the age of digitization? What conditions transform an image into a mnemonic object, and what happens when these conditions cease to exist?
Fashion photography has never been free from criticism. The beauty standards of a given moment change from year to year: bold becomes even bolder, then suddenly restrained and angelic. Yet despite constantly changing trends, the relationship between muses and photographers has long formed a productive creative symbiosis. However, artificial intelligence now disrupts this long-established balance, fundamentally altering the future of fashion photography. So, what does the future hold for this particular branch of photography? [1]
Photography is one of the most rapidly decoded forms of information, and its ability to address large audiences in a democratic way inherently carries the potential for change. Before the age of photography, the narrative of historical events could not easily be shaped from below, at the level of ordinary citizens. Today, however, victims can personally document injustices inflicted upon them and share these images with the world. By crossing linguistic and cultural boundaries, photographs enable us to understand what is happening in other, unknown parts of the world. What makes a photograph an act of activism? What roles do the photographer and the receiving social context play? And why are photographs sometimes capable of triggering social change?
As artificial image-, music-, and text-generating tools become increasingly widespread, a growing number of dilemmas surface alongside them. The current copyright categories applied to content created with artificial intelligence stem from a legal framework that predates AI, leading to unclear outcomes in some cases. Among the most recent concerns are the ethical and legal questions surrounding the use of AI-generated images—an area so new that no precise regulatory framework yet exists. As a result, individuals using generative AI can often create content at their own discretion, raising questions about responsible creative conduct.
For a long time, it was widely accepted that photography has evidentiary power because what it depicts is not a product of imagination but real, existing phenomena from the external world, captured by the photographer at a specific moment in the past. This belief was not only held by the general public but also formed a fundamental basis for art historical and philosophical discourse about photography. However, numerous examples exist of photographs that have been deliberately altered to misrepresent reality. In the modern era, the rapid spread of digital image-editing tools has made such practices increasingly common. Additionally, the emergence of artificial intelligence has introduced new grounds for skepticism regarding images. To what extent can we trust a photograph? Is such mistrust truly a phenomenon of our time?
We live surrounded by noise: the sound of traffic, the murmur of a beach, the chatter of a schoolyard, the roar of a concert, or the constant hum of a shopping mall. Visual culture has its own form of noise—visual saturation. How can we still recognize a meaningful photograph within the endless sea of pixels in today’s image-based culture?
A mesterséges képgeneráló eljárások kapcsán gyakran felmerül az a kérdés, hogy mennyire lehet az MI által készített képeket fényképként kezelni vagy megközelíteni. Ezeknek a generált képeknek gyakran tapasztalható sajátossága, hogy a fénykép vizualitásának másolására törekednek. A mesterséges képeken megjelenő kompozíciók a szín- és látványvilág, illetve grafikai megvalósítottságuk miatt valóban közelebb állnak a fényképeken megszokott vizualitáshoz, a szemlélőnek azonban több lényeges különbségre érdemes ébernek maradnia. Az egyik ilyen differencia abból a magától értetődőnek tűnő tényből adódik, hogy a mesterséges kép nem a külvilág látványát rögzíti, hanem algoritmusok által kreál látványokat.