SEEING AGAINST SEEING
Limited Edition Book
Seeing Against Seeing is an artist book created in collaboration with designer Teun van der Heijden and the Anti-Kriegs-Museum in Berlin. It is one of several outcomes of Silent Hero, a visual research project and historical investigation into my grandfather’s unspoken experience during World War II.
My photographic practice is rooted in the documentary tradition. Like many practitioners, I am often confronted with the challenge of visualizing the invisible, or in some cases, the non-existent. This includes giving presence to absences in family and state archives, or speculating on what a repressed memory might have felt like. If photojournalism attempts to show us events we couldn’t witness firsthand, one of generative AI’s more provocative promises is to imagine events that never happened, but could have. It is this speculative capacity that drew me to collaborate with artificial intelligence.
At the heart of Seeing Against Seeing is a dialogue with Ernst Friedrich’s 1924 anti-war manifesto War Against War!, a publication that sought to strip war of its glorified image. Friedrich compiled graphic photographs of World War I’s aftermath to reveal war’s brutality and absurdity—using evidence as protest. In contrast, my approach employs generative adversarial networks (GANs), trained on thousands of WWII-era portraits of soldiers posing in studios or in the field. The resulting synthetic images are ghostly and grotesque—evocative of Friedrich’s original selection, yet fundamentally different. They resemble war photography, but lack any claim to direct witnessing. They are not documentation, but hallucination.
And yet, within that hallucination lies a strange kind of truth: a subliminal image that underlies the visible one, the flesh under the skin. These synthetic images become witness accounts not of actual events, but of psychological states—inner landscapes shaped by trauma, fear, and silence. They attempt to access places where the camera cannot go, evoking memory as sensation rather than as fact. This grotesque face of war—disfigured, non-indexical, unmoored from specific geography—emerges not despite the imperfections of AI, but because of them. These distortions resist the rational clarity of traditional photography and instead evoke something closer to Goya’s depictions of war, or Doré’s gravures of Dante’s Inferno, expressions of conflict as archetype, as psychic terrain.
In the broader discourse around AI, much of the technology’s mystique has been deflated and reframed as merely statistical pattern recognition. But I believe its imperfections hold potential. Rather than trying to simulate photography, I use these imperfections as openings into other ways of seeing and knowing. My practice, whether working with photographs, archives, moving images, or AI—uses these tools as instruments of both research and storytelling. Through combining mediums and methods, I aim to develop a methodology that extends photographic practice into a collaboration with the non-human, capable of exploring histories that defy resolution.
Seeing Against Seeing extends beyond the page. Transcripts from my film No One Is Forgotten are interwoven throughout the book. In the film, World War II veterans in Brighton Beach confront the same AI-generated images reproduced here. Far from remaining silent, they recognize details, summon memories, and renegotiate their own narratives in dialogue with the machine’s hallucinations.
The book also features Bogna Konior’s essay War in the Age of Infinite Evidence: On AI-Generated War Photography, which situates this project within broader questions of technology, memory, and the politics of vision.
By placing technologies of seeing a century apart into conversation, Seeing Against Seeing becomes a meditation on vision itself: how we see, what remains unseen, and how the act of seeing might be directed against itself.
Edition: 271 + 24 Special edition + 7 Gravure edition + 3 Plate edition
ISBN: 979-8-218-79238-1
Price list:
Pre-sale: $250
Regular Price: $300
Special Edition (includes signed photogravure): $500
Gravure Edition (51 Photogravure in the book): $1500
Plate Edition (51 Photogravure in the book + Original Polymer Plate + Book Cradle): $5000
Book Table: $1500
SEEING AGAINST SEEING
Artist Book
Krieg Dem Kriege by Ernst Friedrich 2001 1980-1994 edition
51 original photopolymer photogravure on Stonehenge 250gsm Warm White paper
102 sheets of vellum
Mylar cover with UV printed title
Stamp book from Ukraine
Reproduciton of a postcard from Naum Lipkin, my granduncle who disappeared in WWII
Original polaroid
2mm steel welded book case
Artist Book Edition: 24 + 2 AP + 4 EP + 4 Dummy
Collections:
Edition 1-24 Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Library Special Collections, Baltimore, MD
EP 3 - FOAM Museum, Amsterdam, NL
Dummy 3 - The Photobook Museum, Cologne, GE
Seeing Against Seeing is shortlisted for Dummy Award ‘24.
Exhibitions:
FOAM, Amsterdam, NL
MOMUS Costakis Collection, Thessaloniki, GR
Hangar Art Center, Brussels, BE
Forthcoming: Sineglossa, Palazzo Poggio
Plac-art, Paris, FR
