Trust, After the Photograph

At a time when synthetic images circulate with unprecedented speed and plausibility, the crisis around photography is often framed as one of verification: how to tell what is real from what is fabricated. Imaging After Photography, on show at the Moody Center for the Arts in Houston until 5 May, takes a different approach. Rather than signal the impending death of the medium or attempt to restore trust in the image, the exhibition deliberately inhabits what its director, Alison Weaver, describes as “a place of unknowing”. 

The phrase signals a curatorial refusal to treat AI as a problem to be solved, or photography as a medium to be rescued. Instead, the exhibition treats uncertainty as a condition of contemporary image culture, examining how images are produced by or in tandem with algorithms, and what it means to look at them when truth is no longer assumed. “When I think museologically, often the goal is to trace and define an art-historical tradition or a progression,” says Weaver, who curated the exhibition. “That was not our goal. We wanted to create a platform for conversation, not to trace a definitive narrative.”

Imaging after Photography (installation view, Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, Houston, Texas). Photo: Alex Marks. Courtesy Moody Center for the Arts

Curatorial Method Meets Institutional Model

That position aligns with the Moody’s broader model as a non-collecting art institution embedded within Rice University’s science- and engineering-led campus and operating at the edge of Houston’s Museum District. Its free public programming emphasises cross-disciplinary exchange over affirming established canons. As Weaver puts it, the aim is to generate forms of engagement distinct from lectures or documentaries, using artworks to open discussion around contemporary issues, “such as our relationship to the world of images and, by extension, our understanding of reality?”

The exhibition’s starting point was a conversation with Trevor Paglen, artist-in-residence at the Moody last year, who speculated that the 2004 Abu Ghraib torture photographs — once received as incontrovertible evidence — might now be dismissed as fabrications. The suggestion crystallised something larger about our current inflection point, in which even trained eyes can no longer reliably distinguish between images made in the world and those generated from data. “We don’t know what we’re seeing,” she says, “and we don’t know where this technology is taking us.”

Grégory Chatonsky, Completion 1.0 (still), 2021, video, modular aluminum structure, sound, dimensions variable. © Grégory Chatonsky

Competing Models of Machine Vision

The show responds by staging differing artistic positions rather than a single thesis. 

Paglen’s work exposes what normally remains unseen: the hidden infrastructures, training sets and classificatory systems that shape machine vision, foregrounding the politics embedded in AI and challenging assumptions of technological neutrality. Refik Anadol’s immersive Quantum Memories: Nature Studies approaches the machine perspective differently, drawing on hundreds of millions of images of the natural world to produce an ever-shifting AI landscape. The images no longer document experience so much as model it, presenting nature as the machine interprets it.

Other works focus on how authority can be simulated. Grégory Chatonsky’s Completion 1.0, drawing on ImageNet-derived material, pairs generated imagery with a synthetic voice performing art-historical interpretation. Moving between the plausible and the absurd, the installation shows how easily coherence can be performed, and how little that coherence guarantees.

A third strand turns to archives and datasets, shifting between analogue and digital processes. Sofia Crespo feeds nineteenth-century cyanotypes by Anna Atkins into neural networks to produce speculative hybrid organisms that sit between classification and invention. Lisa Oppenheim uses AI to reconstruct an extinct iris once cultivated by Edward Steichen, translating the output into labour-intensive dye-transfer prints. Joan Fontcuberta’s What Darwin Missed playfully entangles historical photography, evolutionary theory and machine-generated imagery to question assumed truths, while Nouf Aljowaysir trains systems on colonial-era photographs by Gertrude Bell to produce images in which Middle Eastern women are erased — a reminder that algorithmic interpretation does not transcend historical bias but often amplifies it.

Imaging after Photography (installation view, Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, Houston, Texas). Photo: Alex Marks. Courtesy Moody Center for the Arts

Pluralism, Limits and Curatorial Stakes

Weaver characterises the artists as “optimists and sceptics” in conversation, reflecting her belief that discussion about AI is currently driven largely by commercial actors, and that “more voices are needed at the table”. The artists here operate less as visionaries than as translators. “They’re not neutral,” she adds, “but they’re also not telling you what to think.”

Across the show, emphasis falls not on whether AI is good or bad, or whether photography is finished or reborn. Instead, it foregrounds the conditions under which images are made, classified, trusted and granted authority, and how those conditions shape belief. In this sense, Imaging After Photography functions less as a showcase than as a mediator: a space in which artistic, scientific and public forms of knowledge intersect. The exhibition does not position art as a corrective to technological anxiety, nor as a simplified translation of complex systems. Instead, it complicates how knowledge itself is visualised. For viewers accustomed to trusting images – whether in journalism, science or everyday media – it poses a more unsettling question: what happens when trust is no longer guaranteed by the image but must be actively interrogated?

The exhibition does not mourn photography’s lost authority, nor does it celebrate its algorithmic future. Instead, it confronts a quieter shift: the burden of belief has moved from the image to the viewer. If photographs once arrived with an implicit claim to truth, today that claim must be doubted, contextualised and sometimes resisted. The exhibition offers not resolution but rehearsal: a testing ground for how we might learn to look, doubt and think again. In a culture saturated with synthetic imagery, its most valuable contribution may not be clarity but attentiveness – not belief restored, but belief examined.

Imaging After Photography at Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University, Houston, Texas, through 9 May