Misplaced: Scenes from an Uncertain World is a series of hybrid portraits made at the intersection of immersive photography and generative AI.
I begin by photographing individuals in states of transition – carnival participants, ritual performers, or people whose clothing and gestures signal temporary identities. This approach situates me inside the event rather than observing from a distance, allowing each portrait to emerge from a genuine encounter. I then build AI-generated environments that act as symbolic extensions of the sitters. These imagined spaces are shaped by intuition, atmosphere, and the emotional charge of the moment.
The tension between a real human body and an artificial world produces an uncanny effect: the familiar becomes strange, the symbolic becomes visible, and identity appears fluid and negotiable. This process also exposes the biases and omissions embedded in machine-generated imagery.
The resulting portraits invite viewers to question not only what they are seeing, but how visual truth is constructed in an image culture increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence. At first glance, my work may appear to move between modes inconsistently but instead tests how different kinds of spaces behave when they are all synthetic. Naturalistic landscapes, theatrical interiors, banal commercial settings, “studio-like” voids, all become variations of algorithmic space, each producing a different psychological and cultural effect on the body.
The sequence I have chosen is: ancient ritual → performed everyday identity → spectacular excess → childhood innocence → historical dream → uncanny dissolution.
