An image created with AI won the Sony World Photography Award, which is great news for photography

One of the photos awarded at the Sony World Photography Awards 2023 was not a photo, but a generative image created with artificial intelligence. The creator himself, Boris Eldagsen, revealed it on his website. ?The image, PSEUDOMNSIA | The Electrician, shows two women, one almost hidden behind the other, with a bewildered look, and hands touching them. The impression is that it is an old photo, scanned and retouched, or an image taken with an analog camera.

A category apart

The fake photo won the Open Creative section, a minor category for which the submission of a single image is required, which can also be retouched, without any specific limitation. Unlike the World Press Photo, where the awarded images must comply with the stringent rules of photoreportage, the Sony World Photography Award often rewards photos in which the creative component is predominant. Therefore, posed, retouched and processed images are allowed. ?

In the Open Creative Professional category, for example, Lee Ann Olwage won with a series called The Right To Play. Some of the images are portraits of African girls that the artist has re-photographed by superimposing flowers on their faces. One of the images from the series was even chosen for the cover of the official catalogue.

The provocation

On the day of the awards, Eldagsen published a statement on his website in which he thanked the organization for selecting the image, but declined the award: “Thank you for selecting my image and for making this historic moment, as it is the first AI-generated image to win a prestigious international photography competition. How many of you knew or suspected that it was generated by artificial intelligence? There’s something not right, right? AI-generated imagery and photography shouldn’t be competing for an award like this. They are different entities. Artificial intelligence is not photography. Therefore I will not accept the prize”.

Eldagsen further explained that his was an attempt to understand if photography competitions are prepared for the participation of images generated by artificial intelligence. In his opinion they are not. “The world of photography needs an open discussion. A discussion of what we want to consider photography and what not,” writes Eldagsen. “Is the photography umbrella big enough to invite AI images to participate – or would that be a mistake? With my refusal of the prize I hope to accelerate this debate.

The response from Creo, the agency organizing the award, could have been less vague. In fact, it is not clear whether the award was officially withdrawn from Eldagsen, but the photo of him was certainly removed from the exhibition at Somerset House in London where the works of the winners of the Open categories are exhibited together with those of the professional categories. Creo explained that the decision was a consequence of Eldagsen’s refusal of the award. Creo further explained that “the creative category of the open competition welcomes various experimental approaches to image creation, from cyanotypes and rayographies to cutting-edge digital practices. For this reason, following our correspondence with Boris and the guarantees given, we considered that his work met the criteria for this category and supported his participation.”

The cold impression, almost a week after the award ceremony, is that on the one hand the organization wanted to limit the potential damage to the image of the selection, while on the other the artist aspired to magnify a controversy that plays into his new professional trajectory of creative image generator.

A missed opportunity

The organizers missed an excellent opportunity to fuel an important discussion on the role of generative images in photography. On the other hand, it is enough to take a look at the offending “photo” of Eldagsen to understand that AI cannot even aspire to compete with photography. It is no coincidence that the “photo” was only admitted to an Open creative section, for which the rules are deliberately loose.
The contrast with the real photos that won the main categories of the competition is abysmal and helps to understand why the controversy has almost no reason to exist. Not so much for the questionable “graphic” credibility of Eldagsen’s generative work, but for its complete and blatant lack of conceptual depth.

The first prize of the World Photography Award went to Edgar Martins for a series of portraits taken in Libya, during a dangerous and adventurous journey in the footsteps of his photojournalist friend Anton Hammerl, executed in the country in 2011. The winner of the Sustainability Prize, Alessandro Cinque , recounted in images the struggle against water scarcity in the poor neighborhoods of Lima. Hugh Kinsella Cunningham’s photos showing Congolese women’s struggle for peace won first prize in the documentary section.
So putting aside the controversies, by awarding a minor prize to a generative image, the Sony World Photography Award proved if anything that photography is alive and well even in the age of artificial intelligence. Because images can certainly be generated, but the Photos, those with a capital “F”, are not the print hung on the wall in an exhibition. They are everything that comes first, in the photographer’s mind, in the finger that crystallizes a unique and never repeated moment in the story that a few single frames are able to tell like no other medium can.

If instead what comes before the image is a very detailed command that tells a software what to generate, the result will only be a simulacrum, in the most meaningful sense of the term. Of course, the image produced may deceive anyone who sees it in an exhibition, in a newspaper, on a social network. That simulacrum can be dangerous, with the right aura and the right level of uncontrolled diffusion. It will perhaps be able to excite, in the presence of an artificial narrative. It may imitate almost to the point of making itself indistinguishable, but ontologically it will never be “Photography”: Eldagsen’s artistic boutade at the Sony World Photography Award is the best demonstration of this.