Leading NZ photographer's new AI focus
Yvonne Todd's latest work embraces technology she was once deeply suspicious about, but AI offers her a new powerful way of working, she says.
One of New Zealand’s leading photographers and artists, Yvonne Todd has announced she is now only working in AI.
Todd’s latest exhibition, Autochromes opens at Wellington’s McLeavey Gallery on November 26 and heralds this change.
The work is both a homage to photography and a lament for its passing, as we know it.
Silvana_777 from Yvonne Todd's Autochromes exhibition.
Yvonne Todd
It’s a series of AI-generated photographs of winged female figures.
To emphasise their synthetic origin Todd has placed a digital watermark across each.
They are, Todd writes in an exhibition statement, both “corporeal and spectral, neither fully divine nor entirely human. Each figure, hovering “in a timeless zone.”
Todd won New Zealand’s inaugural leading contemporary art prize the Walters Prize back in 2001, a year after receiving her Bachelor in Fine Arts. She was made an arts laureate in 2019 and among her major exhibitions here and overseas, was the survey Creamy Psychology which took over the entire City Gallery Wellington in 2015.
Yvonne Todd turns completely to AI
Despite the controversy surrounding AI, she hasn’t had experienced much push back over her use of the technology, she says.
“Well, I think the response has generally been quite encouraging, because people can see that there's a connection with my existing work and the AI work.
“So, I don't feel there's a massive shift in the appearance of the AI images. AI makes images that I can't make without considerable resources. So that, for me, is the appeal.”
AI’s plasticity is a powerful artistic tool, she told Culture 101.
“AI is almost like having a piece of plasticine. There's something really plastic, mouldable, flexible, kneadable about it, which is what I like.”
Yvonne Todd.
Yvonne Todd
Her latest work is a lament to photography, she says.
“My artistic identity has been totally entwined with being a photographer for 30 years. And it's... for me, it is the end of that.”
Autochromes echoes the work of the pioneering Lumière brothers in the 19th century, she says.
“Their early colour photography technique, which died because it got surpassed by easier, cheaper-to-produce technology.
“And photography, I feel, as we know it, is moving to something else as well.”
