Expand and Contract 2025: AI and Alternative Processes considers AI technologies as the most recent addition to the world of alternative processes, along with works that explore the connections between AI, camerawork, analogue technologies and visual storytelling, whether while capturing images or printing them. These selected works are showing in conjunction with selected works featured in an in-person exhibition at our DTLA gallery, opening on June 12, 2025.
Technological developments hasten pronouncements regarding the death of photography every few decades, with the most recent trigger being digital innovations, such as digital cameras and image editing software. And yet, photography persists. In fact, it continues to re-define how we engage with one another, imagine ourselves and our position in the world. Most recently, AI caused an uproar among visual practitioners, as machines have been trained to create images using images produced by humans who were not paid for services unknowingly provided. Moreover, AI seems to pose a threat to human agency.
From a creative standpoint, this exhibition considers such conflicts and wonders whether AI is another tool that will expand alternative means to create images, or another step toward the end of photographic creativity as we know it.
