After Walker Evans 2

Aphic

In 1938, Walker Evans documented rural America in American Photographs through straight photography—a style free from manipulation or staging, preserving an unembellished record of reality. In 1981, Sherrie Levine rephotographed Evans’ images in After Walker Evans, part of the appropriation art movement that recontextualized existing works to critique authorship and originality in the age of mass reproduction. In 2024, this project continues that dialogue by reconstructing the very scenes Evans captured using Stable Diffusion. Created 43 years apart, Evans’ original photographs, Levine’s appropriation, and this AI-based reconstruction form a lineage that examines how image-making evolves across eras and technologies. Through this process, the project reveals what AI loses and adds when mimicking photography, and redefines the shifting boundary between photographs and AI images.

Project Collaborators:

Direction & Production: Aphic (Takanari Miisho, Fumitaka Sato) Color Correction: Rihito Niitsu Filming: Kenji Saito Research: FIGLAB A Project by amana inc., Tokyo