Afterimage: Photography in the Digital Age brings together a selection of cutting-edge work by Irish and international artists exploring the material and conceptual transformations that have profoundly altered our sense of what a photograph is and can be.

Curated by Darren Campion, Photo Museum Ireland.

Digital technology has transformed how we encounter and understand photography. From the ubiquity of smartphone cameras and image-sharing apps to the reality-bending potential of AI, the ways in which a photographic image can be made and manipulated have increased exponentially.

The exhibition focuses on the creative possibilities of new technology and its application to photography as part of challenging hybrid practices that embrace a range of visual media. In a culture saturated with images and information, never offline, data has become a potent aesthetic resource for artists to draw on. From Ailbhe Ní Bhriain’s haunting archival interventions, to the screen-based mediation of Linn Phyllis Seeger’s personal narratives, and Michael Schäfer’s large-scale digital montages, the works in Afterimage chart the multiple, diverse ways a photographic image can now exist.

They also suggest the extent to which these transformations are already implicit in the history of the medium. Photography has always been a promiscuous, unstable technology, slipping between different categories, uses, and modes of presentation. This instability has reached a crisis point with the advent of digital media, often radically disconnecting images from context and meaning. The featured artists work to make this break apparent in their use of divergent materials and sources, such as Alan Butler’s cyanotypes of video game flora, or Alan Phelan’s exploration of speculative possibilities in photographic history.

Given the power of images to shape our understanding of the world around us, influencing public perception and shared narratives, the questions that are prompted by the artists in Afterimage are increasingly urgent. At stake is how our collective sense of reality is determined and sometimes deformed by a constant flow of visual and photographic information. The material and conceptual play of the artists in this exhibition, fragmenting positions, identities and histories, reflects a moment when old certainties are collapsing, and we are obliged to confront the continually shifting values of our digital present.