Celebrations of Life: GenAI & the Essence of Portraiture
Portraits can give a sense of importance to a person and their life; it can make a person more widely known; it can also give immortality to a person’s character. Across time, portraiture has been used to delve into the soul of its subjects, capturing their essence in strokes of paint or digital pixels. Beyond mere replication, it seeks to unveil the unique stories, emotions, and individuality of each person depicted. Digital tools and online generative AI platforms offer unprecedented opportunities for experimentation and sharing, fostering a vast community of creators.
Photographer James VanDerZee created an extraordinary chronicle of life in Harlem during the 1920s and 1930s. VanDerZee applied a darkroom technique he used in his studio work to his funerary photographs, using photo montage to insert poems and spiritual imagery around the subject. He photographed the deceased both in life and in death, and would layer original portraits over the funerary ones. Over the years, mural painters have used portraiture to memorialize loved ones. An outdoor mural of Christopher Wallace, AKA The Notorious B.I.G., was created by artists Naoufal “Rocko” Alaoui and Scott “Zimer” Zimmerman of Spread Art NYC in 2015. In this way, portraits can become a destination, as well as a representation, a tribute, and a memory.
In 2021 I created the AI-generated Gilded series to celebrate people who have passed on and touched my life in some way. I used neural style transfer or NST to apply specular reflection to selected photographs of the people. NST merges two images, taking the style from one image and content from another image, resulting in a new and unique image. Specular reflection (specularity) is the reflection of an actual light source. The amount of specularity of an object depends on two factors — how shiny it is and how dark it is. This effect works wonderfully with darker skinned subjects, enhancing their facial features.
Besides making subjects ‘pop’, specularity addresses what is often overlooked: algorithmic bias, systematic and repeatable errors in computer systems that create “unfair” outcomes, such as “privileging” one category over another in ways different from the intended function of the algorithm. Experimenting with Deep Style, Deep Dream Generator’s version of NST, I fell into making gilded portraits of notable people such as Michael K. Williams, Greg Tate, Quincy Jones, Desmond Tutu, Sidney Poitier, and others. After posting these images on Instagram close friends and relatives of these people found them and some of them reached out to me. That is how the Greg Tate mural in Brooklyn came to be (see above) and, more recently, the John Amos ‘celebration of life’ program cover.
Seeing something leave the computer screen to become a physical manifestation (printing) of a digital, or AI-generated concept or idea has opened the door to connecting with communities. Critics of generative AI art have claimed that the images “have no soul” and do not touch people the same way more traditional, analog methods do. But then I remember Harlem photographer James VanDerZee using the technology of his time to experiment with montage and collage, layering meaning into this work. The meaning in the Gilded series is more subtle, creating a feeling of warmth and light emitting from people or subjects, as well as capturing their essence. Also, in print or mural form, the AI portrait becomes a part of the environment. It memorializes or records the passing of loved ones.