The eclipse of the referent: inhabiting latent space

A few days ago, during the quiet of an afternoon dedicated to portfolio reviews, the silence was broken by the faint vibration of my phone. The notification displayed the name of Boris Eldagsen. For those who follow these pages, his name will be familiar. Back in March 2023, I interviewed him¹ for Discorsi Fotografici, during the turbulent days when his refusal of the Sony World Photography Awards sparked a heated debate across the contemporary art world.

That exchange was more than an interview. It marked the beginning of an ongoing dialogue built around photography’s own identity crisis. In his email, Boris strongly recommended an article² he had recently contributed to and he urged me not to lose sight of a debate that has now found renewed theoretical depth in Joan Fontcuberta’s recently published book, Immagini latenti. La fotografia in transizione, released by Mimesis Edizioni.

©Boris Eldagsen – PSEUDOMNESIA/The Electrician

From the analysis of the Catalan master’s work, it clearly emerges that the transition in question does not constitute a mere technological adjustment but rather represents a radical reconfiguration of epistemological paradigms. The concept of the “latent” is shifting from the chemistry of the darkroom to the algorithmic abstraction of mathematical space, carrying with it questions that challenge our very ability to define reality itself.

A necessary point of reference in this discussion is the work of Miles Astray, whose intervention at the 2024 1839 Awards became a revealing test of our current blindness. By submitting a real photograph of a flamingo folding its neck to a category dedicated to Artificial Intelligence, Astray did more than deceive a jury- he exposed an ontological paradox. His victory, followed by the inevitable disqualification, showed that reality still carries a kind of imprint that algorithms can only imitate with obsessive precision. However, the point raised by Astray is even more subtle: if reality must now disguise itself as synthetic to be recognized as exceptional, then our gaze has already been colonized by probabilistic logic. This confirms what Barbara Grespi and Federica Villa argue in Il postfotografico⁵: photography has severed its bond with indexicality. It is no longer the trace of an event, but a language that has exchanged testimony for simulation, becoming an aesthetic object no longer accountable to what once stood before the lens.

Joan Fontcuberta – Immagini latenti –
La fotografia in transizione – Ed. Mimesis

Boris Eldagsen’s ideological manifesto fits precisely within this fracture between action and result. In our ongoing conversations, Boris has repeatedly insisted on the taxonomic necessity of calling things by their proper name: promptography. For Eldagsen, the insistence on including generative imagery within the category of photography is an error that creates a dangerous semantic confusion. If the photographer confronts the world by physically standing before it, the promptographer interrogates the archive from within it. This is not a rejection of technology, but a defense of photography’s historical integrity. This consideration finds a significant echo in ethical and theological discourse: not by chance, in our podcast interview⁶, Father Paolo Benanti proposed the term “synthography” to define this emerging phenomenon, emphasizing how the generative image is essentially the visualization of a collective unconscious stored online—an archive of data that has little to do with photography as the traditional “writing of light”.

Running parallel to this is the radical proposition by Andrew Dewdney in Forget Photography⁷. Dewdney argues that the nostalgic attachment to the term “photography” is itself the main obstacle to understanding contemporary visual culture. We must have the courage to forget photography to finally see networks and computation for what they are: not tools of reproduction, but engines of autonomous generation that do not require a physical referent in order to produce meaning.

©Miles Astray, F L A M I N G O N E, 2024

Where Eldagsen draws a clear distinction, Gregory Chatonsky identifies a metaphysical fusion that pushes Fontcuberta’s thesis into even more radical territory⁸. For Chatonsky, artificial intelligence does not create; it evokes. The “latent space” described by Fontcuberta becomes, in his reading, a hyper-archive where every possible image already exists in a state of mathematical potentiality. We are no longer creators of visions, but archeologists of a future already written in code.

Seen from this perspective, Astray’s intervention resembles the final gesture of an optical humanism that refuses to accept that is has become only one subset of simulation. If, as Chatonsky suggests, reality itself is now an emanation of calculation, then the latent image is no longer something waiting to be revealed, but something that precedes our very intention to look. The photographer of this transition becomes a “curator of the possible,” navigating statistical noise in search of fragments of meaning within an archive that increasingly exceeds us.

Yet, this archive is far from neutral. As Sara Benaglia and Mauro Zanchi warn in Le immagini infestate⁹ _and Le insidie delle immagini¹⁰, contemporary visibility is populated by algorithmic ghosts. The images we consume are haunted by invisible structures of power, by biases embedded in datasets, and by an automated gaze that shapes perception in hidden and insidious ways. Read through Benaglia and Zanchi, Fontcuberta’s latent image becomes an insidious image: it does not simply show, it acts, transforming the observer into a passive subject within flows of information.

Post-photographic aesthetics is therefore not a conquest, but a battlefield where human identity is constantly challenged by the machine’s ability to produce a version of truth more seductive than reality itself.

So where have we arrived, and what should we expect next? Photography is not dying; it is undergoing a metamorphosis- dissolving its physical body to become something more diffuse, ubiquitous and liquid. If Astray defends matter and Eldagsen demands terminological rigor, the reflections of Dewdney, Benaglia, and Zanchi push us toward a more difficult intellectual act: accepting that the image is no longer a certification of reality, but a laboratory of doubt. Fontcuberta’s book is not an obituary for photography, but a map for navigating this no-man’s-land where light has been replaced by calculation.

Perhaps, as Boris’s unexpected email suggested, we should not fear the end of photography, but rather our inability to recognize the ghosts inhabiting this new latent space. The real challenge awaiting us is no longer to produce new images, but to learn how to survive their autonomous proliferation, trying, somehow, to remain human amid the endless ripples of algorithms.

Mirko Bonfanti