Dinner had been served in the ballroom of the hotel on London’s Park Lane, but Boris Eldagsen had little interest in his meal. He was too nervous. The German photographer had been invited to the Sony World Photography Awards as the winner of the creative open category, but he was about to give an unscheduled speech explaining why he couldn’t accept the prize.

“I was frightened of course,” says the 53-year-old, recalling the moment in April 2023 he walked to the stage in his rented tuxedo, picked up the microphone and began to speak. “The whole thing was like a crash course in psychotherapy.”

Eldagsen told his audience he had entered the competition simply to stimulate debate. His winning picture, The Electrician, was not a photograph; it had been created using an artificial intelligence image generator called DALL-E 2. The two women in the atmospheric black-and-white composition were figments of his imagination, an idea he communicated to DALL-E 2 using a series of text prompts which were interpreted and rendered by the software’s machine learning algorithms.

The photographer walked back to his table and braced for a reaction. He expected to be admonished by the event’s organisers – and other photographers – but no one approached him. He flew back to Berlin happy to have spoken his truth, but frustrated by the lack of debate.

In fact, the fuse had been lit, it just took a few days to burn. With media interest in AI running high, the story of a photographer winning a high-profile competition with a “fake” picture began to make headlines around the world. Creo Arts, the company that organises the Sony awards, insists it had been “looking forward to engaging in a more in-depth discussion on this topic,” but Eldagsen’s decision to decline his award forced it to “suspend our activities with him and in keeping with his wishes, remove him from the competition”.

Eldagsen hotly disputes this. “I realised they had no interest in it,” he says. “They want business as normal. They couldn’t be bothered with the crazy German.”

As an early adopter of AI image generators – he became a DALL-E 2 beta tester in the summer of 2022 – Eldagsen has had plenty of time to think about the technology and its implications. When his partner was diagnosed with cancer later that year [she is now in remission], he went “full-on” into AI to distract himself during long waits in hospitals and doctors’ surgeries.

He likes the term “promptography” to describe images created entirely by AI generators such as DALL-E 2 and Midjourney. “I can give you good reasons why this isn’t photography,” he says. “It’s not only because photography is creating an image with light, it’s also how you work. Most photographers go out into the world, they’re on location with other people. They have an experience and they react to what’s happening.

“I got a beautiful email from an Italian poet who said his mum has Alzheimer’s and he sees that in the picture.”

Boris Eldagsen

“When I work with AI I can sit on my own in my cellar using just Wi-Fi and electricity – I have no material constraints. AI generators allow you to express an inner journey, so you need to be aware of yourself, your influences and what you want to create. Even though I don’t need to leave my house to work with AI, it’s important to have done so in the past.”

He smiles. “It’s actually an advantage to be a bit older – to have life experience – when you work with AI.”

As the man who lifted the lid on Pandora’s box, Eldagsen finds himself in demand. He’ll be in Melbourne next month as one of the key artists at the PHOTO 2024 festival. The Electrician and another AI-generated picture from his series Pseudomnesia (the Greek term for a false memory) will be part of an outdoor exhibition, and he’ll give a talk at the festival’s Ideas Summit called “Outsourcing the muse? AI Creativity vs. Human Creativity”.

He’s no stranger to Melbourne, having spent several years living and teaching in the city in the late 1990s after falling in love with an Australian artist. “Australia has been good to me,” he says.

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It’s important to note that The Electrician isn’t the first AI-generated image to win a photographic competition, and it’s unlikely to be the last. The software is evolving at a dizzying speed and traditional forms of content creation are feeling the heat. Stock and advertising photography are obvious targets – why book a studio, a model and a photographer when you can generate a tailor-made image on your phone? – but it seems few forms of photography will be impervious to machine learning.

Eldagsen is often asked if AI is the death knell for photography. His answer: it depends on what kind of images you’re talking about. “As an artist I only see advantages because I work purely with my imagination,” he says. “For me, it’s a tool where I’m the director and the algorithms are my many assistants.”

It is vital to understand the strengths and weaknesses of AI image generators, he says. If you don’t, the software will take control and make all the decisions. When Eldagsen creates an AI image, he does so using his knowledge of art history, photography and the interplay of light. “It’s not like I write a quick text prompt and it’s done. I have a complex workflow and each stage needs to be evaluated. Sometimes a prompt doesn’t work and I’ll have to wait a few weeks for a new [software] feature to become available and then it will work.”

The Electrician was the result of more than 20 prompts, he says. It also used “inpainting”, a feature which allows the software to fill in missing information – part of a face, for example – by taking cues from the surrounding image. He also used DALL-E 2’s “outpainting” option, the ability to automatically extend an image beyond the boundaries of the prompt. It’s the reason The Electrician has a rather peculiar format.

While he’s happy to explain how the image was made, Eldagsen has no interest in interpreting the result. “I got a beautiful email from an Italian poet who said his mum has Alzheimer’s and he sees that in the picture,” he says. “Others have said the subjects are the same woman at different ages. But I think it would be wrong for me to interpret it. Art is not about telling you something, it’s an impulse for an inner journey. If I give you an interpretation you can put it in a box and it’s finished. This is something you need to sort out for yourself.”

PHOTO 2024 runs March 1-24 throughout Melbourne and Victoria. Boris Eldagsen takes part in PHOTO 2024 Ideas Summit at Federation Square on March 15.

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