There’s something subtly peculiar about what you see when you walk into Le Hangar in Brussels on a gloomy January morning. The walls are covered in photographs or objects that resemble photographs, such as historical figures, faces, and landscapes. However, none of them were taken. Not with a camera, not with a shutter, and not by someone standing in a spot where light is falling in a specific direction. They were produced. spurred into being. And whether that changes everything or virtually nothing at all is the question that lingers in the air, unsaid but unrelenting.
For European photography, the AImagine exhibition represented something of a turning point. Le Hangar, which has been establishing itself as one of the continent’s more serious exhibition venues for photographs for almost ten years, decided to open this year with a program that is solely focused on AI-generated art. A co-curation process headed by historian Michel Poivert, involving eighteen artists, and an international open call. Regardless of where a conversation purports to be going, this type of institutional action usually indicates where it is really going.
The director of the venue, Delphine Dumont, presented it with the kind of candor that organizations don’t always manage. She admitted that the choice might appear to be a break from the more conventional obligations of photography, even a betrayal. However, she described it as essential. That framing has a certain plausibility. Digital manipulation, phone cameras, and algorithmic image curation on social media platforms are just a few of the new pressures that photography has always had to deal with. AI is not becoming a reliable medium. It’s approaching one that has been unresolved for many years.
The argument each artist made as a group was what made the show worthwhile to watch, not any one of them. The pair Brodbeck & de Barbuat showcased work that purposefully highlighted AI’s shortcomings, such as blurry faces, impossible hands, and figures that don’t fully resolve, and viewed those errors as success rather than failure. Their piece, which was based on a famous photo of Yoko Ono and John Lennon, revealed something surprising: the algorithm depicted Lennon in a way that suggested death, seemingly drawing from the cultural remnants of how he has been remembered since 1980. No human curator might have made that deliberate decision. Without even realizing it, the machine completed the task.
The Martinique series by Jordan Beal took a different approach to the same subject. The question of what it means when an AI model, trained almost entirely on data from the global north, attempts to render a place it has never really been taught to see was raised by his hybrid images of landscapes he characterizes as places of repressed memory. What was lacking contributed to the striking outcomes.
Meanwhile, the institutions are unable to keep up with the speed at which the ethics discussion is progressing. Based on interviews with working photographers, including those whose voices have historically been marginalized in the industry, research published in late 2024 consistently found concern not only about AI-generated images but also about the deeper patterns of bias that AI tends to inherit and amplify.
Many photographers, including those from the global south, black photographers, and photographers with disabilities, had spent years pointing out that the photography industry already had a problem with whose reality it chose to depict. Instead of loosening those patterns, AI that has been trained on that body of work runs the risk of locking them in.
Given the direction the photography industry is taking, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that the most intriguing questions aren’t actually related to technology. They have to do with what technology makes visible. Mounting AImagine didn’t solve anything for Le Hangar. It put the argument on the wall and allowed people to stand in front of it, which may have been a more beneficial action.
FAQs
1. What was AImagine, and where did it take place?
A first-ever AI-generated imagery exhibition, held at Le Hangar, Brussels, January 2025.
2. Why did Le Hangar dedicate an entire show to AI-generated work?
Director Delphine Dumont called it a necessity, not a betrayal of photography.
3. What did the Brodbeck & de Barbuat piece reveal about AI?
The algorithm rendered Lennon as near-death, exposing AI’s unintentional cultural inheritance.
4. What concerns did photographers from marginalised communities raise about AI?
AI trained on biased photographic archives risks permanently locking those biases in.
5. Did AImagine offer any resolution to photography’s AI debate?
No — it put the argument on the wall and invited reflection.
