The End of Photography
From Heliography to Algorithmic Imagination
This essay was developed through a dialogic thought process in collaboration with generative AI systems, particularly Anthropic’s Claude AI and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The discussions on image, medium, and imagination not only provided content inspiration but are themselves part of the reflection: the text not only discusses the algorithmic transformation of the photographic—it is a product of this very change.
June 2025, Przemek Zajfert
Prologue: The First and the Last Gaze
In the late summer of 1827, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce held the world’s first permanent light image in his hands after several days of exposure. Two hundred years later, in 2027, we may witness the end of photography—not its physical disappearance, but its ontological transformation into something fundamentally different.
The question of the end of photography is not one of decline but of metamorphosis. It leads us to the fundamental properties of what we understand as a photographic image and confronts us with the realization that these properties are undergoing radical redefinition in the digital present.
Genesis: Light as a Witness of Time
Niépce’s heliography—literally “drawn with the sun”—marked the beginning of a new relationship between time, light, and memory. The process was not only a technical innovation but an existential revolution: for the first time in human history, it was possible to permanently fix a fleeting moment without the interpreting hand of an artist.
Roland Barthes recognized in this property the essence of photography: the “ça a été”—”it has been.” Photography became the irrefutable proof of the existence of what it shows. It was not an interpretation of reality but its indexical trace—a direct physical imprint of the light reflected by the depicted objects.
This evidential function of photography was based on its material foundation. The silver halides in film, the light-sensitive layers on glass or metal—all were physical substances altered by light. Each photograph was thus a unique piece, a material object with a specific history of creation and decay.
Transformation: From Chemistry to Mathematics
The transition to digital photography initially appeared as a mere technical advancement. CCD sensors replaced chemical films; pixels replaced silver grains. Yet this seemingly gradual transition marked a fundamental break in the nature of the photographic image.
The digital sensor does not produce a photograph in the original sense but data—mathematical descriptions of light values. These data are transformed into what we perceive as a digital image only through algorithmic processes. Between the original light impulse and the final image lie countless steps of interpretation: demosaicing, color corrections, compression, display algorithms.
The digital image is thus no longer a direct imprint of reality but the result of a complex translation. It lacks the indexical quality of analog photography and is instead a construction—precise and reproducible, but without the existential connection to the depicted moment.
Perfect Reproduction: The Loss of Aura
Walter Benjamin diagnosed the loss of the “aura” of the artwork in the age of its technical reproducibility as early as the 1930s. What he only hinted at for analog photography becomes a complete reality in the digital era: the digital image knows no original.
Every copy of a digital file is identical to the “original”—there is no hierarchy between versions, no degradation through reproduction, no traces of time. This apparent perfection, however, deprives the image of an essential quality: its transience and thus its humanity.
Analog photography aged with us. Its color changes, scratches, and spots told the story of its existence. It was not only a witness to the captured moment but also to its own time. The digital image, on the other hand, is timeless—a mathematical abstraction that resists entropy.
The Algorithmic Gaze: Machines as Photographers
Google Street View marks another turning point in the history of the image. Here, photographs are no longer made by humans for humans but by machines for algorithms. The images are created automatically, cataloged automatically, and evaluated automatically. The human gaze becomes the exception, not the rule.
This machine photography follows different laws. It does not document significant moments but systematically everything. It knows no composition in the artistic sense, only complete capture. It creates an archive of totality—every street, every facade, every random passerby.
Paradoxically, this machine documentation approaches the original claim of photography: the objective recording of reality. Yet it does so without human intentionality, without the selective gaze that defines the photographic.
Synthetic Vision: AI-Generated Images
The latest evolutionary step leads to a complete detachment from reality: AI-generated images emerge without any reference to existing objects or moments. They are pure imagination—dreams of digital neurons that calculate new visual realities from statistical patterns.
These images possess perfect credibility without ever having corresponded to anything. They can show people who never existed, places never built, situations that never occurred. They break the fundamental promise of photography: the testimony to what has been.
Thus, we return to a pre-photographic situation: images become constructions of imagination again, as in painting. But while the painter reveals his subjectivity, the algorithm conceals its operations behind a mask of objectivity.
Material Renaissance: Return to Substance
In light of this development, the question of the materiality of the image gains new relevance. In a world of perfect digital reproducibility, the physical object becomes the guarantor of authenticity again. The silver gelatin print, the Polaroid, even the inkjet print—all carry the traces of their physical existence and thus a promise of uniqueness.
The renaissance of analog photographic techniques is more than nostalgia—it is resistance against the dematerialization of the image. Young photographers turn to film cameras not despite but because they are impractical. They seek imperfection, randomness, transience—all qualities that the digital image has systematically eliminated.
The Quantum Mechanics of the Image: Observer and Reality
Quantum physics teaches us that the act of observation changes the observed reality. Similarly, the act of photography changes the photographed reality—and conversely, the reality of photography changes our perception.
In the digital era, this interaction becomes complex and opaque. Filters in social media change faces in real-time. Algorithms automatically optimize images. The boundary between capture and manipulation disappears. Every digital image is potentially suspect of being manipulated—and most of the time, this suspicion is justified.
The End as Transformation
The end of photography is not its disappearance but its transformation into something else. What dies is the naive notion of photography as an objective testimony to reality. What emerges is a complex ecosystem of visual practices in which analog reminiscences, machine documentation, and algorithmic imagination coexist.
Photography has always been more than just a technique of image production—it was a form of thinking about time, reality, and memory. This way of thinking survives its technical foundation and transforms into new media and practices.
Epilogue: Looking Ahead
As we symbolically mark the end of the two-hundred-year era of photography in 2027, we will not mourn its disappearance but must understand its metamorphosis. The question will no longer be: “Is this photography?” but: “What makes an image an image?”
Perhaps we return to Niépce’s original intuition: an image does not arise through technology but through the human gaze that recognizes something lasting in the fleeting moment. The heliography of 1827 was less important as a technical innovation than as proof of the human longing to stop time.
This longing survives all technical revolutions. It will find new forms, invent new media, discover new ways to materialize the fleeting. The end of photography is thus also its eternal new beginning.
“Photography is dead—long live the image.”
- Barthes, Roland: Die helle Kammer. Bemerkung zur Photographie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989.
(Original: La Chambre claire, 1980) – zentral für das Konzept des „ça a été“. - Benjamin, Walter: Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. In: Illuminations, 1935.
(Zahlreiche Ausgaben, z. B. bei Suhrkamp oder Reclam) - Flusser, Vilém: Für eine Philosophie der Fotografie. Göttingen: European Photography, 1983.
(Medienphilosophische Reflexion über den „Apparat“ der Fotografie.) - Ritchin, Fred: After Photography. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.
(Zur Transformation der Fotografie im digitalen Zeitalter.) - Rubinstein, Daniel; Sluis, Katrina: The Digital Image in Photographic Culture: Algorithmic Photography and the Crisis of Representation, in: Photographies, 2008.
- Batchen, Geoffrey: Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.
(Reflexion über die historische Entwicklung des fotografischen Blicks.)
