Silver gelatin on fibre base, sepia toning.
Reproduced glass plate slide, portrait reject #5, 1939, 2023.
Silver gelatin on fibre base, sepia toning.
Silver gelatin on fibre base, sepia toning.
A door from the portrait studio leads into an area for trimming, mounting and retouching portraits. A small pile of yellowed offcuts remain. Windows are blocked by large shelves, added sometime in the 1960s. The darkroom is empty but for the stains and strong smell of chemicals.
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These portraits emerged from research into my grandmother’s work as a portrait retoucher and colourist during the 1940s and 50s. As a starting point for my own engagement with the practice, I turned to generative AI to create a series of era-specific, unretouched portraits.
This decision was driven by two concerns: first, the difficulty of sourcing untouched photographs that weren’t under copyright; and second, ethical hesitation around using real women’s images without consent. Yet the AI raised new problems of its own, it could only produce plastically perfect, uncannily smooth images—lacking the subtle imperfections and tactile realism that defined my grandmother’s hand-rendered craft.
Working overtop with charcoal to reintroduce imperfection and initiate my own retouching process, I began to reflect on the limitations of an AI trained only on databases of polished final images—devoid of the cast-offs, trials, and workshop remnants that once quietly populated photographic studios but remained invisible to the public eye.
These twin doppelgängers began to embody not just the unseen artifacts of human process, but also the constraints of generative AI and its problematic inherent hyperreality.