Fred Ritchin

Potential Histories, Parallel Universes

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Potential Histories, Parallel Universes explores how artificial intelligence and synthetic imagery are transforming the perception of reality and questioning photographic authenticity. The exhibition confronts analog photography with a new visual paradigm that challenges its limits and potential, proposing a dialogue between traditional photographic creation and new images generated by algorithms.

Just as photography allowed 19th-century painters to explore new paths such as Impressionism or Cubism, today’s photographers face a similar challenge: reinventing their medium in a world where synthetic imagery rewrites the rules.

The goal is not to replace the authenticity of analog photography but to open a space for reflection on how these new tools can integrate or challenge the current visual discourse. Ultimately, the exhibition invites viewers to reconsider what it means to “see” in the 21st century and how photography, in all its forms, remains essential to capture, debate, and redefine reality.

All of these images are synthetic, not photographs, generated by artificial intelligence systems in response to text prompts by Fred Ritchin. They have been transformed, and the result is a C-type Lambda photographic print.

All of these images are included in his book The Synthetic Eye Photography Transformed in the Age of AI

Fred Ritchin (New York, United States)

Fred Ritchin is a writer, educator, curator, and photography critic. He is the dean emeritus of the International Center of Photography (ICP) School where he also founded the documentary photography and photojournalism one-year program. Ritchin was professor of Photography & Imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and co-director of the NYU/Magnum Foundation photography and human rights educational program. He is also the author of four books on the future of imaging; his latest book, The Synthetic Eye: Photography Transformed in the Age of AI, was just published by Thames & Hudson.

Ritchin was picture editor of the New York Times Magazine, created the first multimedia version of the New York Times (1994-95), as well as “Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace” (1996), an early online documentary featuring the photographs of Gilles Peress which was nominated by the Times for a Pulitzer Prize.

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