In 2019, I began creating photographic portraits of people who lived before the invention of the camera, using generative AI. One of my early experiments was a portrait of Napoleon created in 2020. At the time, it was seen as strikingly realistic and was shared internationally, because synthetic realism of that level was still unfamiliar to most viewers. Looking back only five years later, it is almost unimaginable that this early work was ever perceived as lifelike.
Since then, both the technology and our understanding of these methods have advanced at an exponential pace. The 2025 version of Napoleon makes this shift unmistakably clear. Napoleon has always been one of the most recognisable faces in European history, and he died, ironically, only five years before the first photograph was ever taken. This proximity to the birth of photography, combined with his iconic status, makes him an ideal figure for understanding how dramatically our sense of realism has evolved. It fascinates me how visual culture shapes our perception of historical figures, and how these images influence the way we think about the past and about ourselves.
Recent years have seen an unprecedented surge in computational resources, research, and corporate investment pushing the limits of AI systems. These developments have accelerated synthetic photography far beyond what seemed imaginable in 2020. Over the past year, we crossed a threshold where the boundary between real and artificial has blurred, and the uncanny valley has lost its meaning. In many cases, it is no longer possible to distinguish between classical photography and synthetic, or AI photography.
The cultural and social consequences of this shift are impossible to predict, but the impact on every aspect of the world we know is certain. This side-by-side view of the two Napoleon portraits marks a moment in which image making has changed fundamentally. It shows how quickly our expectations evolve and how important it is to approach this new visual reality with clarity and intention.
Both portraits shown here are generated by me, and they sit within a larger mission that drives my practice: to question how we construct reality, how images encode power, and how emerging technologies reshape our sense of identity, history, and authorship. As an artist, I have always felt a responsibility to interrogate these shifting conditions and to understand the role images will play in a world where the boundary between the real and the synthetic has almost completely disappeared.
We now have to think seriously about what this development means and where we want it to go, for as long as we still have any influence on its direction. How do we navigate a world where visual truth is no longer guaranteed
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We need to smell you.