ZA :

In a talk, you also mentioned how a reader brings their own perceptions into a photograph. So, much like the image maker who is capturing their version of a reality, the scene further passes through the lens of a viewer’s own experiences. And I find it so intriguing with photography, because I notice that we read an abstract image with far more of our own deliberations, in comparison to a photograph with human beings.

MP :

Yes, and I think that when there’s an individual in the photograph, at a subconscious level, it brings an ethical dimension to the image. The viewer feels less free to project their own thoughts and feelings onto another person, unlike a purely abstract image that may be more accessible to the imagination. This contradiction is what makes documentary work interesting to me, this friction between ethics and aesthetics.

ZA :

In 2017, you travelled to Pyongyang on an assignment for The New Yorker with Victoria Gonzalez-Figueras and American journalist Evan Osnos. As a photographer who's interested in the boundaries of documentary and reportage, how close do you think this experience was to absolute reality?

MP :

That's a good question. It's actually very difficult to define because the experience of being there was very much a state of mind in which you're mentally and emotionally manipulated by the State, and by the minders that are accompanying you on a very specific itinerary. This manipulation is intentional, in a way that you are made to believe that you are free and can work, but in fact it is a tactic to scrutinize your behaviour and reveal your true self. In terms of an experience of reality, I think it was very hard to tell if things were staged for us or not. Sometimes, because our planning was made six months in advance, there was enough time for a behavioural preparation of the people we were allowed to interact with. But at the end of the day, it didn't really matter to me, because in the bigger picture it was a very much controlled representation of what we were seeing. And at the same time, you are reminded that they are also just people that live there and go about their daily life, and that's the reality of it. I chose not to do any research before I went there. I was just there to make photographs and be guided by the State. I was wearing the hat of a photojournalist, playing according to the rules of the game, not manipulating anything and being as objective as possible. But of course, this was taking place in an arena where photojournalism is impossible, underneath a blanket of censorship and scrutiny of a dictatorship. With the ring-flash aesthetic, I was able to signal to the viewer that these photographs depict a carefully constructed embellishment by the State, and therefore, produce the effect of truth independently of their own literal truth.

ZA :

In 2017/2021, you researched the first AI-powered camera that was trained by previous World Press Photo winning images from 1955 onwards. You write that the camera is programmed to recognize, make, and save only winning photos, which are automatically uploaded to the dedicated website: trophy.camera. Now that AI is so much a part of our discourse about photography, I was wondering if you were aware during your research that this is where we’d be today, and if there was fear or a sense of excitement when you look at the work retrospectively?

MP :

I did suspect that photography would evolve to become much more computational, but I didn’t expect it to happen so quickly. When we [Dries Depoorter] were working on Trophy Camera, one of the central ideas was that photography is formulaic. It repeats the same tropes, the same conventions, the same formal compositions, and so on. What Trophy Camera tries to do is speak about the conventionality of photojournalism that is a contradiction to its claim to authenticity and objectivity. What I find interesting is that AI generative imagery is entirely built on existing images, which means that it's also impossible for it to think outside of what's already there (for now). What the algorithm generates is the residue of all images that already exists, squeezed out into nothing but empty conventional forms. Right before Midjourney was launched, I was working on creating a program in which you could describe a photograph in text in order to generate it. A kind of news desk for possible events. It was a tongue-in-cheek idea, a sarcastic way of saying that with AI we don't need photojournalists anymore because with just a few words we can generate seemingly photojournalistic images. This horrific scenario has now become a reality, with the cost of non-AI-generated documentary work quickly losing credibility.

ZA :

To conclude, since your primary source of presentation and expression has been through books so far, I was wondering if you are still drawn to that form, and if you see your work continuing in that vein?

MP :

I have the feeling that my book State of Emergency marks the end of a certain methodology, and the beginning of developing a new approach. Until now, I've looked for the relationship between documentary photography and suggesting a kind of narrative to weave images with different materials together. But more recently, I'm attracted more to the rejection of narrative. Moving away from the need to tell stories, and thinking more about pictures as non-narrative spaces. So, of course, that's going to result in different ways of creating work. Although as we speak, I’m working on a new book dummy! I will always love the book form, and think it's a powerful way to operate under the radar and outside of the art world – an independent vehicle for dissemination and resistance.  Visit www.maxpinckers.be for more information about the artist