Alexey YurenevSeing against seing (Exhibition copy of 4)

Seeing Against Seeing is an artist book created in collaboration with designer Teun van der Heijden and the Anti-Kriegs-Museum in Berlin. It is one of several outcomes of Silent Hero, a visual research project and historical investigation into my grandfather’s unspoken experience during World War II.

My photographic practice is rooted in the documentary tradition. Like many practitioners, I am often confronted with the challenge of visualizing the invisible, or in some cases, the non-existent. This includes giving presence to absences in family and state archives, or speculating on what a repressed memory might have felt like. If photojournalism attempts to show us events we couldn’t witness firsthand, one of generative AI’s more provocative promises is to imagine events that never happened, but could have. It is this speculative capacity that drew me to collaborate with artificial intelligence.

At the heart of Seeing Against Seeing is a dialogue with Ernst Friedrich’s 1924 anti-war manifesto War Against War!, a publication that sought to strip war of its glorified image. Friedrich compiled graphic photographs of World War I’s aftermath to reveal war’s brutality and absurdity—using evidence as protest. In contrast, my approach employs generative adversarial networks (GANs), trained on thousands of WWII-era portraits of soldiers posing in studios or in the field. The resulting synthetic images are ghostly and grotesque—evocative of Friedrich’s original selection, yet fundamentally different. They resemble war photography, but lack any claim to direct witnessing. They are not documentation, but hallucination.

Softcover, 18 x 11 cm, text, interleaved tracing paper, laminated images, display on metal support. Exhibition copy 1/4 numbered and signed. Edition of 36 copies.