LensCulture B&W Awards 2024

12 ott

The project “Augmented Unreality” selected in the juror’s pick for the prestigious award.

https://www.lensculture.com/photo-competitions/black-and-white-photography-awards/2024/winners

I am pleased to announce that my project Augmented Unreality has been selected for the prestigious Black & White Photography Awards in the Juror's Pick category. Receiving this recognition is a great honor, made even more significant by the insightful commentary provided by Michael Foley of the Foley Gallery in New York. His words perfectly capture the essence of my project, highlighting the role of artificial intelligence in redefining our ideals of beauty and humanity.

Foley emphasized how the project "challenges the very tool and the way it shapes our beliefs and ideals." This concept is central to the Augmented Unreality series. Today, more than ever, we live in an era where technology is reshaping our aesthetic standards, often standardizing them through algorithms that, instead of reflecting human diversity, tend to create homogeneous and superficial beauty ideals.

In Gracefully Grown Old, the image chosen to represent my work, I wanted to reflect on this very process. The photograph captures a delicate balance between humanity and AI-generated creations, in a visual experiment that invites us to question who or what is truly shaping our aesthetic ideals. The work stages a human figure dissolving, symbolizing a beauty that seems to be fading, absorbed by increasingly predefined algorithmic ideals. As Foley observes, "In Pezzotta’s lab-like settings, an experiment is underway where increasingly sharp AI-generated creations mask the softer presence of the human form, often dissolving, becoming a distant memory."

Augmented Unreality is not merely an exercise in style or technique. It is an invitation to deeply reflect on the relationship between artificial intelligence and beauty, on the need to preserve an idea of beauty that is authentic, inclusive, and diverse. At a time when technology has the power to reshape our aesthetic standards, I believe it is essential to emphasize the importance of working outside technological tools to maintain our integrity, authenticity, and above all, our diversity.

The photograph Gracefully Grown Old serves as an example of how artificial intelligence, while being a powerful creative tool, must be scrutinized and used consciously to avoid leading us to a limited vision of human beauty. As artists, our task is to explore new frontiers without ever losing sight of the human essence—made of imperfections, memories, and nuances that no algorithm can ever replicate.

I thank the jury of the Black & White Photography Awards for this recognition and for giving space to such a timely and necessary reflection.