Evidence Redux

Way back in 2008 I had created a body of work called Evidence which were constructed still life images that were photographed and composited in Photoshop. You can find that work elsewhere on this site.

This body of work uses Midjourney Moodboards to reference the style I created through photography and compositing while broadening the subject matter that is available to me, along with expanding the types of textures, contrast of scale, and metaphorical elements.

I then used Lightroom and Photoshop to refine the tonal palette, textural elements and retouched selectively to fine tune the compositions.

To me this is somewhat revelatory—the earlier images were cumbersome to make, difficult to refine and required significant ‘fiddling’. These were made through a creative flow state of tweaking the ideas, varying prompts, refining the reference images, and then subsequently polishing in ‘traditional’ software.

Exploration came fast and with the joy of discovery that I only often get to experience these days.

Are they better? Are they trash because they were made with AI? Ultimately I think I could mix the two bodies of work together and no one would know, and to me that makes the answer pretty clear.