Authenticity

What is it we really want out of authenticity? Is it a sincerity of expression or the intensity of the feeling it evokes within us? What if the experience itself is genuine, but its origin is not? In an age of generative AI models, deepfake technology, advanced image synthesis, and reality filtered through digital interfaces, it can be deeply frustrating to pose such questions. The emergence of photography, seen at the time of the daguerreotype as an unquestionable imprint of reality, has instead opened up space for manipulation, selection and staging – and contemporary technological developments have radicalised this discrepancy even further. It is no longer a mere question of manipulation, but of a deeper shift of the framework in which authenticity is recognised and lived.

This issue opens with a piece by Ukrainian author Kateryna Radchenko that explores how visual language has changed since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. She has written the article in the gaps between power outages during December and January’s blackouts in Kyiv, where she has been living long-term. Her view of the war is thus shaped not only by drone footage, videos, and satellite imagery, but also by the perspective of everyday experience, in which visual representation intertwines with direct encounters with crisis and uncertainty. Personal experience of war also features in the diary entries of Sasha Kurmaz, whose collages and fractured structures illustrate the fragmentation of identity and emotional instability of life under constant threat. Here, authenticity does not lie in a complete image, but in its acknowledged incompleteness.

I find this chilling, as I do reading the essay Seeing Genocide: Weaponization of Images. “Images do not have an innate truth; they live in community with or against those who are involved in them.” In this text, author Ariella Azoulay shows just how dangerously convincing the authenticity of viewer experience can be. In the inhuman destruction of Gaza, images are not merely witnesses to genocide; they actively become part of it. The genocide does not play out in a single shocking image, but in a prolonged, instrumentalised abundance of images that ultimately manufacture consent to violence. 

The speculative and fictional worlds of Daniel Felstead, Mark Dorf, and Martin Newth test how quickly we are willing to settle into hybrid landscapes and situations. Here, digital manipulation or synthetic nature are not an opposing reality, but an extension thereof. Can such an image be more suggestive than a photograph of an actual physical landscape? Perhaps today we are concerned about an image’s origin less as a reason to trust it than as a way to find our footing within it.

In her artistic practice, Nigerian artist Minne Atairu also explores traces left by violence, the act of rendering them visible, and their impact on cultural memory. Using the AI model DALL.E, she undertakes a speculative “restoration” of the Benin Bronzes, which were violently looted during British colonisation in 1897. In a similar vein, Sofia Crespo works with incomplete and selective datasets, demonstrating that the authenticity of the past is always read through the prism of the present. Can artificial intelligence serve as a tool for reinterpreting cultural heritage after it has been physically uprooted from its original context?

Thus, this issue does not seek to capture or define authenticity. Instead, it observes it as a mutable relationship among authorship, technology, the audience, and a world that has long since ceased to be confined to what appears in front of the lens. In this context, authenticity does not present itself as a guarantor of truth, but as a way of orienting ourselves within a reality in constant flux. Perhaps we are no longer looking for an image that we can trust unconditionally. Perhaps we are looking for an image we can linger on. At least for a time.

Barbora Vanická Čápová | Editor