This work belongs to the chapter THE THEORISTS of De Nooy's project Photology. Arjan de Nooy selected a number of quotations Susan Sontag’s now classic book On Photography (1977) and fed them to the AI system DALL•E 2, a deep learning model that automatically generates images from natural language. In the series The Theorists, these quotations are combined with the resulting simulations.
Photology is a body of work based on the eponymous book — a photobook about photography played by the author. Inspired by the work of the Czech philosopher Vilém Flusser (1920-1991), who thought photography fundamentally changed the way the world is seen, Arjan de Nooy puts forward his own view on photography in 20 propositions. The title refers both to the study of the medium as well as to the logic of photography games.
Using found photographs, postcards, online images and photo simulations, De Nooy constructs an overview of photography. He organized the book by topical categories, chapters, like History, Chance, Style, Information, or Photography Theorists, without aiming at objectivity or completeness. Each category is explored from De Nooy’s individual perspective and treated in a distinctive, sometimes whimsical, manner. Photology includes De Nooy’s own photography, collage, found footage, re-photographed images, postcards and other appropriated material.