“Un Art Moyen”, Un Prompt Moyen
From light to the prompt, in the age of photography with no camera.
For a century and a half, a photograph was a trace. Someone stood somewhere, light came off a real world, and the picture answered for it. This essay follows that certainty as it comes apart, from the drawer to the hand to the mind, from Bourdieu's family album to the AI image that needs no lens and no one who ever stood anywhere. What survives is the function. What goes is the referent. When the light comes from your own mind rather than the world, responsibility does not dissolve. It concentrates.
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