Generating Sherrie Levine / After After Walker Evans


(April–June 2025)

The work takes its starting point in Walker Evans’ documentary photographs,

which were taken during the Great Depression in the USA.

These images shaped the visual memory of documentary photography

and continue to influence the perception of photography to this day.

Sherrie Levine took up these photographs in 1981 in her work After Walker Evans

by re-photographing them as part of her appropriation art.

Her gesture of appropriation was not an aesthetic experiment,

but an explicit intervention in questions of originality, authorship,

and power relations within the art canon.

Levine exposed the myth of the original and of the male artist as a conscious,

feminist critique of authorship and of the aura of images.

Generating Sherrie Levine / After After Walker Evans continues this concept mechanically,

immediately after the implementation of GPT-4o in ChatGPT in March 2025,

by reproducing the photographs appropriated by Levine from Evans as accurately as possible.

Not as free variations or mere stylistic approximations, but as algorithmically generated repetitions,

calculated from the AI’s training data in order to reproduce the specific photographs

as precisely as possible.

What was a document in Evans’ work and a conceptual intervention in Levine’s shows,

in the work with AI, how historical images are now being transferred into automated, disembodied systems:

systems that can generate images without having had any lived experience themselves,

fed from a collective archive that appropriates authors, contexts, and stories.