A cat. A white chapel. A sailboat on a silver sea. A scene that feels like a memory.
The opening image is AI-generated. It is an illustration for this essay, not a photograph from my Kykladen series.
You might pause when it appears in your feed. Perhaps you imagine the warmth of the stone, the wind around the bell tower, the silence before the boat passes out of sight. The picture gives you enough to finish the scene in your own mind.
But this image is not a record of that encounter. No photographer needed to stand behind this particular cat, waiting for this particular boat. The scene was generated.
Does knowing that change what you see?
The moment before we ask
On social media, we meet pictures before we meet their explanations. We see light, recognise a place—or think we do—and feel something. Only afterwards, if at all, do we ask where the image came from.
That is what interests me about this picture. It does not need to be a bad image to raise a difficult question. It can be beautiful, convincing and moving. The feeling it creates in us can be real even when the depicted encounter is invented.
The problem begins when we mistake the appearance of a photograph for evidence that somebody witnessed a moment.
A cat I actually encountered
In my Kykladen series, there is another cat: “Ich muss eine Göttin sein”, photographed in Lefkes on Paros. There are blue windows, a yellow postbox and the edge of a pool meeting the sea.
These works begin with something I encountered. I was there. I chose a position, a frame and a moment. Other things remained outside the picture. Later, I made further choices in editing and in deciding how the photograph should become a print.
Photography is never a view without an author. A crop can change a story; colour and contrast can change its mood. I am not claiming that a camera produces an untouched truth. I am saying that there is a difference between interpreting an encounter and generating its appearance.
Greece is also part of my own background, not simply a collection of picturesque settings. That connection does not make a picture valuable by itself. It shapes what I return to, what catches my attention and what I choose to keep.
What the camera can—and cannot—promise
For works such as CANAVES I, I work with a FUJIFILM GFX 50R digital medium-format camera. Its high-resolution RAW files give me a substantial starting point for fine detail, tonal adjustments and large prints. Those qualities still depend on the lens, focus, exposure, processing and final print.
That does not make the look impossible to imitate. AI can produce delicate colours, convincing textures and images that print beautifully. Increasing a file’s pixel dimensions is not the same as recording more information from a real scene: generative enlargement may add plausible detail rather than recover something that was actually captured.
So my argument is not “my camera can beat AI.” Equipment alone is not authorship. The distinction I care about is what the image can honestly tell you about its own origin.
Beauty is one question. Origin is another.
A generated image can be art. Human intention, selection and judgment can be involved in making it. Equally, a photograph is not automatically meaningful simply because it came from a camera.
But an image’s history belongs to its meaning. A beautiful invented place and a photograph made during a lived encounter can move us for different reasons. We should be allowed to know which we are looking at.
That is why this image interrupts the blue of my Kykladen posts with a reddish-brown border. It is a pause in the series, and an invitation to look at the act of looking. It is not another photographic work being offered as part of the edition.
Before the next scroll
The next time a picture stops you, try asking three questions: What does it make me feel? What does it ask me to believe? What do I actually know about how it was made?
You do not have to enjoy it less. You may simply see more.
My photographs begin with an encounter. I was there. I looked closely. The work grew from that moment.
— Ares Yannakopoulos · AresDKY
Explore the Kykladen photographs → Meet the artist →
Technical references: FUJIFILM GFX 50R specifications and Adobe on generative upscaling. Opening visual: AI-generated image supplied for this discussion; its framed presentation was also prepared with AI.