T H E N E W YO R K T I M E S B O O K R E V I E W 2 7 Deepfakes, image wars, “nonfiction photography.” A short treatise with aspirations in the Sontag and Barthes camps, Fred Ritchin’s THE SYNTHETIC EYE (Thames & Hudson, $29.95) tells the history of photography through the hindsight and coinages of our DALL-E age. New image-generating tech- nologies actually have decades-long roots in the craft, the book argues. And though scary, they have upsides. A professor and former picture editor for The Times Magazine, Ritchin recounts how digital technology has been replacing “optical photos” with “computational” ones since at least the 1980s — via auto-pixelating sensors, Photoshop, smartphone filters and now A.I. generators. We’re mistrustful now, he argues, and less receptive to “iconic” photos like Marc Riboud’s uplifting flower-power Vietnam protester from 1967, or the horrible image, cap- tured by a Turkish photographer in 2015, of the dead Syr- ian refugee child Alan Kurdi. (No mention of memes, and Trump’s bloody ear photo, to Ritchin, does not count be- cause it’s “hyperreal.”) Lining his chapters like wallpaper are machine-generat- ed concoctions (mainly resulting from Ritchin’s prompts) that are quite willing to supplant the past, disfigure hu- mans in that wonky A.I. way and copy us indistinguishably (see the pastiche of a Stephen Shore landscape). Ritchin manages not to be crotchety about this cliff; A.I. photos “betray memories,” but so do human ones. Instead he sociologizes, attempts peace. One Australian project uses A.I. to visualize the travails of refugee detainees in a way that “may empower those who have been victimized while the synthetic imagery protects their identities.” Fine, but “easy digital reproduction” repels, too — or it should. He quotes Elie Wiesel: “Auschwitz cannot be ex- plained nor can it be visualized.” No machine can do what the Belgian photographer Anton Kusters did when he re- cently trekked to 1,078 concentration camps and shot 1,078 Polaroids of blue sky above each. A grid of them in Ritchin’s book, like a wall of failed cyanotypes, won’t halt the machines’ slow purge of the real. But it’s a high point for back-to-basics humanity in Ritchin’s diplomatic, tongue-biting elegy to the art form. 0 U p Close / ‘Eye’ Witness / B y Walker Mimms A new book tells the story of how digital technology is replacing human photography. WALKER MIMMS’S writing on art and culture appears in The Times, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian and other places. An A.I. response to “the president of the United States pho- tographed by a child.” An A.I.-generated image of “the Salem witches on trial in 1692.” With "The Blue Skies Project” (2018), Anton Kusters captured on Polaroid film the sky above every last known location of the Auschwitz con- centration camp system. An A.I.-generated “photograph of an unhappy algorithm.” “A hopeful photograph made in 2050,” according to A.I. An A.I.-generated “Pictorialist photograph of what one first sees after one’s own death.” G ENERATED BY A.I. G ENERATED BY A.I. G ENERATED BY A.I. G ENERATED BY A.I. G ENERATED BY A.I. 0