Photography without a camera

On Saturday I attended an artist talk at the Museum of Australian Photography focused on three exhibits around “photography without a camera”. One project that really interested me was by Kate Robinson, who created images using generative AI and then made physical prints using the traditional cyanotype process. She ran a workshop on the process in the afternoon

I've been fascinated by optical illusions, like Rubin's vase which can be seen as two faces or a vase. I tried generating the illusion image through text prompts to DALL-E 2 but it didn't work, their AI evidently didn't know about the famous illusion, I just got nice vases. So I experimented with Stable Diffusion instead, knowing I could add a noisy starter image with the same prompt “photo-realistic version of Rubin vase”, this generated something closer to what I needed.

I then gave Stable Diffusion a detailed text prompt asking for “Male & Female Heads in profile facing each other, Professional photography, bokeh, natural lighting” I used the latest SDXL 1.0 model which generates very realistic images. This produced some great portraits which had sharp focus on the faces and soft, blurred backgrounds, while maintaining the illusion styling.

1. Stable Diffusion Starter
2. Stable Diffusion generated images
3. Selected image upscaled
4. Greyscale & Inverted for transparency

I picked one of the four generated AI images with good tonal range, upscaled it, and inverted it to make a negative. Then printed this negative image onto a transparency. Kate had already prepared some watercolour paper with the light-sensitive cyanotype chemicals. I sandwiched the sensitized paper with the transparency under a piece of perspex and exposed it to sunlight for about 25 minutes.

When the transparency was removed the image had magically appeared on the paper! Somewhat faded. Just like seeing that first print develop in the darkroom, under the red light. I rinsed the paper first in water and then briefly in vinegar to set the blue cyanotype tones. In only about 40 minutes, I had gone from an AI concept to a one-of-a-kind cyanotype print, all without ever using a camera!

This project showed me the creative potential in blending digital and analogue photographic methods. I'm re-excited to experiment more with generated AI images and bringing them into the real world through alternative printing processes.