©Maria Mavropoulou, a studio portrait of a married couple, Istanbul 1930’s, from Imagined Images

“The family album is like a memory blueprint, a visual document that proves things unfolded in a certain way, and for me, there were massive gaps. Even though it’s my story, and I’ve come to terms with it, I was longing for a visual archive.” -Maria Mavopoulou

Maria Mavopoulou thinks deeply about technology and it’s affect on our lives. I featured her terrific project, Family Portraits, sometime back and today I share her most recent storytelling foray into technology, Imagined Images. Understanding our personal histories starts with the excavation of the family photo album, something that didn’t exist for Mavopoulou. For Mavopoulou, it has been difficult to understand her personal history without the visual documentation of those who have come before her. She had no visuals of family history to help her understand her place in the world….so she decided to create her own with the use of DALL-E 2.

“When I reflect on my family’s history, I wonder what would have happened if my family had made different decisions, or moved in another direction. Maybe they wouldn’t have lost everything. I don’t have a single photo of a birthday party because I never had one, so I added many images of parties to help me reconcile my actual story. Working with new technologies was not only emotional but informative,” she says about working with technology. “The AI seemed to know more than I did about a specific place and time, adding details to images I wasn’t aware of, like my mother’s work uniform and design elements of our home and garden. While the images don’t have any fundamental tie to reality, there is some version of knowledge in them due to the program’s ability to draw from such vast data sets. We attribute fakeness to AI images, but in many ways, they reflect a universal truth. What excites me is using technology as a mirror. I’m turning a spotlight on technology, trying to understand how it sees us and, in turn, how it shapes how we think about ourselves.”

“AI-generated images have a peculiar relationship with time. Unlike photography, they are not tied to a specific point in time through the scene they depict, rather they can imitate this link. Trained on billions of images, AI has assorted the style and color grading of the medium humans have used to create images in the past. Especially when a photographic result is requested specifying the time and the place that an image was created, for example in the 60s, AI adjusts the colors and the overall feeling of the generated image accordingly. But how will we be able to date AI images when looking back in time? Deformations, distortions, ambiguity in the form, and the “in-house” style are the giveaways.”

©Maria Mavropoulou,, a photo of a family portait at a village in Greece, 60′, from Imagined Images

 Imagined Images

What is the use of a photograph? If nothing else, it’s a reference point to a specific moment in time, the moment of its creation, the moment it depicts. Especially family photographs are a tie to our personal history, an archive of whom we are and where we came from. They are “memory deposits” from where we keep sourcing the certainty of our life events even if our own memories of them are lost. In this new project personal memories are absorbed by A.I. and meshed with thousands of others to become a new breed of images, images resembling in an uncanny way those of our childhood photo albums. But what is the use of this new kind of image since they lose their fundamental tie to reality? What is the memory they hold? To whom are they precious, heirlooms that must be preserved?

Trying to reconcile with my own family history,  one of displacement, loss and deprivation I visualized with the use of DALLE-2  moments that happened, moments that were unphotographed, moments I imagined, moments I was told about, moments I have hoped to happen, moments that never happened in order to ask myself: How can one rewrite his own history?

 Created: 2022-2023, the series consists of 136 A.I.-generated images.

©Maria Mavropoulou, a school class photo greece 60’s, from Imagined Images

©Maria Mavropoulou, a photo of a festive family dinner at a village in Greece, 60’s, from Imagined Images

Maria Mavropoulou was born in 1989, she lives and works in Athens, Greece. She is a visual artist using mainly photography while her work expands to new forms of photographic images, such as VR and screen-captured images, GAN and AI-generated images. Her work and research focus on the new realities created by the connectible devices and the contradictions between the physical and the virtual spaces that we inhabit, addressing issues of technological mediation. By using the most novel technology available to her, she creates work that reflects on the new ways images are produced today. Her work explores digital identity and representation in the post-social media era, algorithmic bias, network culture, power politics between machines and humans, and the multidimensionality of our experiences in our always-online world. Her recent projects correlate creativity and AI with the divine as well as reflect on the future of photography amidst the advances of synthetic images.

Maria holds a Master’s in Fine Arts and a BA from the Athens School of Fine Arts. Her work is part of private collections and Vontobel art collection and has been exhibited in institutions and museums in Greece and abroad among which are the National Museum of Contemporary Art of Greece- EMST (2022), Sharjah Foundation (United Arab Emirates 2022), Foto Colectania, (Spain 2022), Tallinn Art Hall, (Estonia 2021), Miami Art week, (2020), 60th Thessaloniki International Film Festival(2019), Thessaloniki Museum of Photography(2019), Onassis cultural center (2019), Athens Conservatoire(2019), Slought Foundation (Philadelphia, USA 2019), Maison de la Photographie, (France 2018), Benaki museum(2018), Unseen Amsterdam, (Netherlands 2018) National Observatory of Athens (2018), Culturescapes festival (Basel, Switzerland, 2017) Athens Photo Festival (2016), Athens Biennale (2015) Mois de la photo,(Paris, France, 2014). Her first VR project Family Portraits has been awarded at the 60th Thessaloniki International Film Festival (2019), and she has also been selected among 30 Under 30 Women Photographers (2018) and a Young Greek Photographer by Athens Photo Festival (2016)

Follow on Instagram: @maria.mavropoulou

©Maria Mavropoulou, a photo of a family with the bride and the groom at a village in Greece, 60’s, from Imagined Images

©Maria Mavropoulou, a photo portrait of a mother holding her baby in Russia 90’s, from Imagined Images

©Maria Mavropoulou, o close up photo of a russian woman in her 40’s wth short dark hair holding a brown pincher dog, smiling at the camera, Russia, 1960, from Imagined Images

©Maria Mavropoulou, a young woman standing in front of a huge blooming bush greece 70’s, from Imagined Images

©Maria Mavropoulou, a happy young couple that just married getting out of an orthodox church as the guests are throwing rice on them in Greece 90’s, from Imagined Images

©Maria Mavropoulou, a baby laying on a bed in a synny room with sunlight coming from the window, greece 1990, from Imagined Images

©Maria Mavropoulou, a todler and a baby studio photo greece 1980, from Imagined Images

©Maria Mavropoulou, a close up photo of kindergarden kid loking at the camera and painting a book Greece 1980, from Imagined Images

©Maria Mavropoulou, A mother wearing swimsuit standing, holding by the hand a todler and next to them a 5 years old kid playing in the sand on the beach by the sea, from Imagined Images

©Maria Mavropoulou, a girl and a boy decorating a christmass tree, Greece, 90’s, from Imagined Images

©Maria Mavropoulou, a girl 5 years old blowing the candles od her birthday cake at a home party in Greece 90’s, from Imagined Images

©Maria Mavropoulou, a christmass dinner with a big family around a table, russia, 80’s, from Imagined Images