Making These Photographs
As a child I used to hold my mum’s slides up to the window; the tiny positive frames made me feel like I was in another world.
I bought a job lot of slides on eBay. Among them was a Kodachrome of an unnamed woman sitting on a couch in window light.
I lost it almost immediately.
I never found out who she was, but she stayed with me. And because I didn’t know her story, I made one up.
The photographs on this site illustrate a novel, not a real family. The project began with a real image and developed into an archive of things that never happened.
I photographed Lila’s chapters on a research trip to New York, and my family photographed the New Zealand chapters. Some images began as written scenes, which I stripped down to keywords and then generated with Google’s Gemini image model running inside Adobe Firefly. Using the initial digital file as a starting point, I then composited, retouched, and graded the work.
Every image on this site has its own row in a separate key: what it is, how it was made, and where it came from.
Making Photographs for a Fictional Family
As a photographer, I couldn’t help visualising the photographs the characters took as I wrote about them. But I cannot photograph Francis’s New York in 1948, Darla’s Rochester, or Sophie’s nineties. If those chapters were going to have photographs, I would have to make them.
After generating each image, I worked on it by hand, printed it on era-appropriate paper, and rephotographed it on a copy stand.
Fake Materiality
Rephotographing the images mattered because I wanted them to become physical objects. I matched the paper, lighting, and copy stand so the set would hold together. Printing and rephotographing each image made a more convincing fake than the digital file alone. Generated images fail: their lighting doesn’t make sense, and their surfaces are too smooth; the grain and texture of my paper masked these flaws.
The 1948 images don’t document anything real; nothing stood in front of the lens. By rephotographing them on a copy stand, I made a real print of a fictional event, but it didn’t make the event real.
The Slide — Remade
With the slide at the centre of the novel still lost, I made one.
I generated the image, printed it digitally onto positive film, mounted it in a 1973 Kodachrome mount, had it inscribed by hand, and rephotographed it on the copy stand.
The inscription reads: Rose, Locust St, 6/28/73. Rose is a character. The street is in the novel, and I chose the date. The slide in the archive is a prop, a stand-in for the missing original.
Sophie’s Archive
To build Sophie’s archive, I used my own photographs from living in Hell’s Kitchen and the Lower East Side during the 1990s as the foundation for her world. If a chapter called for a particular image, I included a personal photograph—so long as it served Sophie’s narrative. If no photograph supported the text, I generated new digital images, composites, or constructed frames to capture the moment.
Sophie’s kitchen, shown above, is the clearest example. I built the generated frame from two photographs stuck in an old album of my apartment on Rivington Street: the same room, the same light, most of the same objects. Then I altered it to suit the story rather than my memory. The microwave on my fridge became a boombox, because the manuscript needed somewhere for Sophie to play a cassette. I even got to do the dishes thirty years later.
The question was which version belonged to the archive. One of my photographs might reflect my memory accurately but not serve Sophie’s story. A generated image might be historically fake but serve her story better.
Real Places
Lila’s photographs are tied to an Instagram account I keep under her name: @lilarae___. The New Zealand chapters depict a harbour and a neighbourhood my family knows first-hand. Both sets show real places, yet the story reframes their history.
An image doesn’t arrive in a box in the loft with its meaning already attached. Someone decided which ones to keep and which to throw away. It might have names and places etched into the mount or written on the reverse, but the human connection, the reason for keeping it, is lost.
Lila holds a photograph of a stranger named Rose. Sophie swaddles her baby in a blanket inherited from someone she doesn’t remember.
Unlike the characters, who inherit photographs and objects passively, I made these inherited photographs by hand, from nothing.
Objects
The objects in this project came the same way the lost slide did: an old wardrobe key, a Kodak Retina camera, a hand-knit baby blanket from the 1970s. I bought each on eBay from a stranger’s clearance. I collected each object as the chapters demanded, folding them into the fictional archive alongside the photographs.
What I Don’t Know
I no longer have access to the full Firefly prompt history. What survives are fragmented filenames produced by the software: the first few words of each prompt, cut off partway through. Because of this, what you see here is an account of my practice, not a complete record.
Every generated image in this project came from Google’s Gemini model. Adobe’s assurances about how its Firefly models were trained don’t apply, and Google doesn’t fully explain what its image model learned from. Keeping photographers’ names out of my prompts doesn’t sidestep the issue. I can’t account for an algorithm I can’t examine.
The Line I Didn’t Cross
Some chapters carry no photograph at all. They’re set in conflicts far from anything I’ve lived through, among unnamed people whose pain has nothing to do with mine. Inventing the visual memory of fictional characters is very different from generating images of real people’s suffering. I didn’t want to cross that line. Those chapters stay blank on purpose.
What This Is
The only real thing is the practice: a copy stand, two lights, a grey card read at the start of every session, the camera locked at the same height, matched paper stock, boxes of objects, photographs made and remade until they held up. The family isn’t real, but every photograph was made by hand.
I made these things so the archive would feel like a real family’s history, even though the reader knows it’s fiction.
What Remains
The photograph that started all this is still gone. I never found out who she was, who took the picture, who kept it, or how it ended up in a job lot on eBay. All I could do was build a world around her: a family, a history, photographs, objects, rooms and absences.
What do you do with a person you can’t recover?