AI is a mirror that shows the darkness in ourselves. An interview with photographer Rhiannon Adam

Aura • 1 | 2025 • Choc • issn 3035-1944 • e-issn 2723-9527 • doi 10.5281/zenodo.17447694 ai is a mirror that shows the darkness in ourselves an interview with photographer rhiannon adam by Ivo Silvestro hiannon Adam is an Irish-born artist photographer based between London and New York. She studied at Central Saint Martins College of the University of the Arts London and at the University of Cambridge, but her creative practice was profoundly shaped by her unconventional childhood. From ages seven to fifteen, she traveled the world on a boat with her father, living “like sea gypsies,” as she described during our extensive conversation at the Verzasca Foto Festival. Adam won the festival’s international competition with her project Rhi-Entry, which documents a private space mission for which she was selected before its abrupt cancellation. Our interview also explored her project A Blueprint for Living, which constructs a counterarchive to reconstruct missing queer histories and imagine alternative historical narratives. For this project, Adam employed AI to generate images (in the section “Touch Me/I Want to Feel Your Body”) and to expose algorithmic biases. Additional information about A Blueprint for Living and her other projects is available on Rhiannon Adam’s website: https://www.rhiannonadam.com. Our conversation1 began with her maritime childhood and how these formative experiences shaped her artistic approach, particularly her distinctive use of Polaroid photography: […] Many of my earliest photographs were shot with Polaroid. Most people use Polaroid for close-ups–typically party pictures. But I always photographed landscapes on Polaroid: very small format capturing vast spaces. This made viewing an intimate experience–the picture is so small that to really see it, you have to wait your turn. I would photograph these intimate landscapes with tiny people always positioned in big spaces. This came from my childhood habit of using binoculars to watch people on shore, just to remind myself that other kids, other lives, other people existed. When you’re at sea, you feel trapped in a bubble where you can’t really connect with life on land–that becomes your reality, this capsule. When I look at my early pictures now, I think, “It’s like I’m looking at the world through glass, like I’m not really part of it and can’t connect.” So was choosing Polaroid part of this search for a strong connection with reality? 1 The full transcript is available online: https://www.thelatethinker.com/utopian-and-dystopiandreams-an-interview-with-photographer-rhiannon-adam/. R Ivo Silvestro 166 It was about that small, intimate quality. But also, as a kid, instead of taking pictures–I have almost no childhood photos–I would collect physical objects. If you had a beer and set it down, leaving a ring on paper, I would write your name and the date and keep that paper as a memory of our conversation. A Polaroid is completely dependent on the elements. There’s a purity in how the chemistry inside the package reacts to the specific moment we’re in. In this room, there’s a certain humidity, a certain temperature. If I hold it too tight, it will show marks. It bears the marks of its birth, of its becoming, in a way that other photography doesn’t. With digital pictures, you can go to your computer later and change them, but you can never touch them. If I develop film, I go into a darkroom and can change the temperature of the bath, which changes the film’s color. I can dodge, burn, change elements in the darkroom. But a Polaroid is the physical manifestation of the picture in its purest form. You cannot edit it, crop it, or change its color. It reacts chemically to its environment and to my body. If I put it in my pocket and warm it, that’s a reaction. It’s a collaboration with my physical body. There’s something very pure about the Polaroid form that’s different even from wet plate collodion or old processes like tintype. With those, I control the coating application. But with Polaroid, everything else is the environment changing it. It’s a co-authorship between me as photographer and the environment where the picture is taken. So the value of traditional–chemical, analog, whatever we want to call it–photography lies in this physical connection with reality? There’s a continuity that digital photography breaks? Yes, it’s like a translation. When you read the original, you understand the author’s true intention. If you read a translation and know the original language, you think, “Yes, it means this, but not quite.” It’s always a parallel. I have many friends who are translators, and I’m not sure they’d fully agree with you, but perhaps to some extent they do, knowing the difficulties. Yes, the difficulty of translation. With digital photography, you often try to transform the image into the version in your mind, not the version that was really there. It becomes wishful thinking: a digital picture sometimes creates an imagined reality–something not quite aligned with what I see with my eyes. But sometimes I want to see the flaw, to see imperfection. I don’t want perfection all the time. Polaroid embraces imperfection. When I was applying for the dearMoon project, I went through many rounds. There were numerous interviews–remember, this was during the pandemic–with breakout rooms where you’d have conversations with different candidates about all kinds of things: life perspectives, crisis management, everything. When it came to presenting our work, I argued that in the age of AI, we’re losing trust in images through retouching. Even with the first moon landings, people doubted they happened. We have so many conspiracy theories about the moon landings. an interview with photographer rhiannon adam 167 Yes, they analyze Apollo Mission pictures searching for supposed flaws… Exactly: “You can zoom in here and this doesn’t look consistent,” or “The flag is flying but there’s no wind on the moon”–all these things. They all have explanations, but there’s something fascinating about that line between fact and fiction, what we can trust, and whether photographs can still serve as evidence. Edwin Land, who created Polaroid, made the square version with the packet of chemicals we call “integral film,” where everything is contained–not the peel-apart kind where you throw half away. Integral film was invented in 1972, and 1972 was the last Apollo mission. So the two never coincided for going to the Moon. Land’s early fortune actually came through military and surveillance work. He even wrote a chapter for President Eisenhower on the space program, called “To the Moon and the Moon as a Goal.” After writing this chapter, his new product appeared on the cover of Life magazine as “The Man and His Magic Camera.” It was groundbreaking for many reasons. Today we think of Polaroid as something “cute” or “quaint,” but back then it was used in police departments–because you couldn’t fake it. It was used in insurance cases: if there was arson, you could take photos on the spot that couldn’t be altered. Every single picture had a unique number. It carried a record, a trace of its origin. You could read the number and know: this was the factory, this was the machine, this was the operator, this was the date. Every photo had its own unique identity. But you’re an artistic photographer. Why are you so interested in the evidentiary value of pictures? Aren’t digital photography and AI-generated images better suited for artistic freedom? Photography has never really been true. As long as we’ve had photography, we’ve selected, cropped, and changed things. Photography is a complicated term–when you say you’re a photographer, the first question is usually “weddings or babies?” There are as many different types of photographers as there are musicians. I have played with AI. I’ve used it in a project, but in a way that questions history. How do we trust records? Record-keeping is important, up to a point. But even with a Polaroid– yes, it’s anchored in reality–it’s still filtered through that specific technology’s lens, the way it sees the world. If you know how to read it, you can find all kinds of evidence inside a picture. I can tell if it was a cold day or a warm day. It might have been taken before I was born, yet I can still read it. It’s like an archaeological dig: when you find pottery, you can tell from the lines and marks about the world it came from. A Polaroid works similarly. You mentioned a project involving AI. Can you tell us more? I’m interested in how AI becomes the everyman–a collection of all our collective biases and thoughts. It becomes the level playing field, the average of human imagination. Not Ivo Silvestro 168 necessarily the best of human imagination, but the average, because it takes inspiration from everything. It doesn’t make hierarchical choices. It doesn’t say this is better than that because it’s not choosing quality; it’s choosing quantity, using information purely as data. AI becomes the common denominator between all of us. If we want to know what the world really thinks about an image of war, we ask it, and what comes back is an average of all the people who’ve viewed it positively and negatively. There’s something interesting in finding humanity’s average. When I worked with AI in my previous project, I used it this way: I put in different prompts, including imagining queer history if certain laws had been different. Henry VIII exported the anti-buggery law to Africa through colonialism. These colonies still maintain that law from Henry VIII’s time. This is why people in Uganda can face the death penalty for being gay–it’s not because of Uganda, it’s because of Henry VIII. A colonial heritage. Yes, and how these things trickle down. We say, “Africa is terrible to gay people,” but actually, no–it’s the UK. It was a king long ago who had many wives and killed them when he wanted new ones. This same man is the reason gay people can face the death penalty in Uganda. So I used AI to imagine: what if Henry VIII had a gay lover? What if Margaret Thatcher had gone to a gay pride march in 1988 instead of introducing a law banning education about homosexuality in schools? I was creating these images, imagining if these things had happened. Maybe if homosexuality hadn’t been so outlawed, we wouldn’t have thought AIDS was just a gay disease, and millions of people wouldn’t have died. There’s real impact between these things. When you label something as “we don’t care about these people, they’re criminals,” then we don’t care about their healthcare. But you forget it’s not isolated to the small group you dislike. So I was creating this project trying to imagine: if the AIDS crisis hadn’t happened, what would a happy retirement home of older gay men look like? What would queer happiness look like without this generational trauma? And the results? When I was creating these images, what was horrifying was that when I asked for “older gay happy couple in their 70s walking along a beach,” they would come out looking monstrous. If I used the same prompt saying “a heterosexual couple walking along the beach,” they came out looking like normal humans. If I said “a homosexual couple kissing at a family picnic, ages 75 and 80,” they would come out looking like monsters while everyone else at the picnic was normal. It was chilling because AI is generating this world by creating from what it’s being fed. We search for these things; it scrapes the internet for information. If people on the internet are saying “this is bad, this is horrible, this is monstrous, this is wrong,” the image created is horrible, monstrous, wrong. AI is just a mirror. an interview with photographer rhiannon adam 169 A mirror but also a magnifier that shows us things we don’t see. It shows the darkness in ourselves sometimes. I think this is maybe the most interesting aspect of AI, more than what it can imagine creatively. Because creatively, right now, it’s very limited to borrowing aesthetics from here and there. As an artist, you feel conflicted because AI is learning from all of us. I can ask it to create a David Bailey-style portrait of any actor, and it will make something. But I didn’t take it. It’s not mine. It’s borrowing someone else’s aesthetic. As an artist, you can control certain parts but not the AI aesthetic 100%. Part of it will always decide what it wants to do. You can say “in the style of,” but you always need a style reference. It’s always “in the style of Manet, in the style of…” It’s not really generating something new and fresh; it’s generating from what has already become. As an artist, you’re always trying to create something looking forward, not just backward. Even though I work extensively with history and archive material, I try to situate the work in a bigger context. Rhi-Entry, for example, is about my experience, about space, but actually it’s about our relationship with looking up–our relationship with the stars. 117 billion humans have lived on this earth, and we’ve all looked at the same sky. Then suddenly we’re launching satellites: we’ve changed that sky in fifty years. 117 billion humans in earth’s history have looked at that same unchanging sky, and now in 50 years we’re changing it. What does that mean for our future? What does it mean for our collective identity when we’re no longer looking at the same continuity? When we look at the sky, we’re looking at deep time. We’re looking at history, at everything that has ever been, everything that ever was. This is our history: we’ve changed so much on Earth, but from out there, we look the same as we always did. There’s a leveling when looking at earth from far away. We don’t look like this corrupt planet where we’re fighting wars and destroying the environment. We look the same as we always did. It puts many things into perspective.