Maria Mavropoulou

Imagined Images explores the relationship between personal photography and AI-generated imagery. Mavroupoulou’s project reflects on the tradition of amateur photography, and how family pictures shape our understanding of identity and belonging through its curated representations. The photographs of her own family were lost due to multiple relocations of her closest relatives so she used their stories and a text-to-image AI model (dalle-2) that draws from vast datasets of images, to recreate the family photo album that she missed and pass it down to the next generation in order to preserve familial history. 

With this work, she allows us to observe recurring themes and visual motifs within these albums; an unspoken set of rules that photographers unconsciously follow, creating a standardized vision of what an album should contain. By incorporating AI-generated imagery, though, her album makes these existing visual conventions blatantly apparent. The artificial faces, distorted and unrecognizable due to the limitations of early AI models, heighten the uncanny quality of these photographs. They embody collective anonymity. While photography once claimed that “an image is worth a thousand words,” Mavroupoulou calls our attention to the fact that text prompts (words) can generate limitless variations of images, redefining the way we think about the creation and meaning of personal history and its making.