The famed Filipino photographer explores the possibilities and challenges of AI images to create imagined pasts and futures
It takes some time for photographer and visual artist Jake Verzosa to get what he wants from Midjourney, the artificial intelligence platform that generates images based on prompts and datasets. He gets an idea and works on the prompts. He finds the ones that he likes and saves them. Then, the program generates images for half a day or the entire day. And finally, he experiments.
Say the idea is a vintage portrait of an imagined and impossible history: Verzosa chooses keywords like “tintype photograph”, “Filipino couple”, “cyborg” and “1920s”. And with these in mind, Midjourney searches through its trove of knowledge, learns from the dataset and later delivers four images. From here, Verzosa does variations, controlling outcomes by fine-tuning the prompts or adding more commands (specifying a range of colours, for example), until he is satisfied with “Saturnina at Felipe”, a sepia-toned portrait of a woman, whose hair is adorned with sprigs of flowers, together with a man whose torso is bound in cybernetic armour.
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He repeats the experiment in his Eternally Yours series, synthesising more of these compelling human-cyborg couples like a mom and her daughter (with an Iron Man-like core) and a guy and his cat (in a vest of circles and knobs) and then shares them on Instagram. If the world collapsed today and an archaeologist from the future discovered these images, he might conclude that an ancient Asian civilisation was able to fuse living tissue with machines. The portraits look convincingly real.
Dreaming with artificial intelligence
Verzosa is really known for the quality of his portraiture. Apart from his work in publications such as the Philippine editions of Tatler and Esquire, the lensman is lauded for his documentary work, which highlights social issues and Filipino culture. His photobook The Last Tattooed Women of Kalinga displayed the full breadth of his powers, presenting the unvarnished beauty of Cordilleran women and their tattoos imprinted on skin with thorn and soot. The collection won the Steidl Book Awards, and even fashion journalist Suzy Menkes wrote about his portraits in Vogue when they were exhibited at the Paris Photo art fair. The images have since been shown around the world, from Amsterdam to Denmark, China to Nepal and beyond.
He has always had his eye on technology, too. The photographer studied information systems in college and has been interested in coding and NFTs. Verzosa was aware of the nascent rumblings of artificial intelligence, especially with the arrival of OpenAI, but like the rest of the world waited to see what would happen. When viable tools such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion became available, he did what any creative would do: imagine and create.
In case you missed it: The Last Tattooed Women of Kalinga—Jake Verzosa on his world-renowned photography series