Natasha Chuk
Photography at the Edges of its Own Ontology
Marshall McLuhan famously argued that the content of any medium is always another medium. More provocatively, he believed that when a medium is pushed to its extremes, it reverses or flips into something else.
This thought offers a critical tool for understanding how photography operates under the pressure of emerging technologies like generative AI (GenAI).
As a medium, photography historically promised indexicality, the physical trace of light upon a photosensitive surface. But as it was pushed by digital technologies (enhanced by computational power, obsolescing analog processes, and retrieving painting or montage), it presents a kind of reversal into something else.
In the generative capacities of AI, photography becomes a simulation engine, extended beyond the chemical or digital capture (and simulation) of the physically present. It becomes a productive rather than reproductive technology.
Yet through this reversion, it can be argued that GenAI images are nonetheless ontologically photographic, inviting us to reconsider what photography is and how it continues in forms that exceed photographic recognition.
GenAI images mark a reversal through training on photographic material and its relationship to language. They remain unbound from any single referent and are instead circuitously tied to many, invoking Vilém Flusser’s particle-driven fifth rung.
They are photographic in aesthetic language and cultural expectation, but their ontological substance is varied instead of singular, yet deeply photographic.
Because of this, GenAI exceeds mere technique or apparatus and comes together as a set of perceptual and cultural logics that can migrate across media.
They do not carry the burden of singular indexicality, but in simulating it, they signal a visual return to photography’s pre-history in painting, staged tableaux, or even dreams.
In McLuhan’s terms, the medium retrieves older forms (pictorialism, allegory, hallucination), while simultaneously inverting into a condition of synthesis.
At these edges, photography does not end, rather folds into another mode of image-making, where authorship, temporality, and the real become refracted, questioned, and reconfigured.
This thought offers a critical tool for understanding how photography operates under the pressure of emerging technologies like generative AI (GenAI).
As a medium, photography historically promised indexicality, the physical trace of light upon a photosensitive surface. But as it was pushed by digital technologies (enhanced by computational power, obsolescing analog processes, and retrieving painting or montage), it presents a kind of reversal into something else.
In the generative capacities of AI, photography becomes a simulation engine, extended beyond the chemical or digital capture (and simulation) of the physically present. It becomes a productive rather than reproductive technology.
Yet through this reversion, it can be argued that GenAI images are nonetheless ontologically photographic, inviting us to reconsider what photography is and how it continues in forms that exceed photographic recognition.
GenAI images mark a reversal through training on photographic material and its relationship to language. They remain unbound from any single referent and are instead circuitously tied to many, invoking Vilém Flusser’s particle-driven fifth rung.
They are photographic in aesthetic language and cultural expectation, but their ontological substance is varied instead of singular, yet deeply photographic.
Because of this, GenAI exceeds mere technique or apparatus and comes together as a set of perceptual and cultural logics that can migrate across media.
They do not carry the burden of singular indexicality, but in simulating it, they signal a visual return to photography’s pre-history in painting, staged tableaux, or even dreams.
In McLuhan’s terms, the medium retrieves older forms (pictorialism, allegory, hallucination), while simultaneously inverting into a condition of synthesis.
At these edges, photography does not end, rather folds into another mode of image-making, where authorship, temporality, and the real become refracted, questioned, and reconfigured.
Natasha Chuk, PhD is a media theorist, writer, educator, and independent curator focused on the intersection of art, philosophy, and creative technologies. Her writing has appeared in Millennium Film Journal, Chronogram, FLAT Journal, and other journals and edited volumes. She is the author of Vanishing Points: Articulations of Death, Fragmentation, and the Unexperienced Experience of Created Objects (Intellect, 2015) and the forthcoming Photo Obscura: The Photographic in Post-Photography (Intellect, 2025). She teaches courses in the areas of film, photography, video game studies, new media art, and media theory at the School of Visual Arts and Parsons in New York City.