photographies

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpho20

AUTHENTICITY AND THE POOR IMAGE IN THE AGE

OF DEEP LEARNING

Amanda Wasielewski

To cite this article: Amanda Wasielewski (2023) AUTHENTICITY AND THE POOR IMAGE IN THE
AGE OF DEEP LEARNING, photographies, 16:2, 191-210, DOI: 10.1080/17540763.2023.2189158

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2023.2189158

© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa

UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
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Published online: 25 May 2023.

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ARTICLE

Amanda Wasielewski

AUTHENTICITY AND THE POOR IMAGE IN THE

AGE OF DEEP LEARNING

Deep learning techniques are increasingly used to automate categorization and identi­
fication tasks for large datasets of digital photographs. For rasterized images formats,
such as JPEGs, GIFs, and PNGs, the analysis happens on the level of individual pixels.
Given this, digital images used in deep learning applications are typically restricted to
relatively low-resolution formats to conform to the standards of popular pre-trained
neural networks. Using Hito Steyerl’s conception of the ‘poor image’ as a theoretical
frame, this article investigates the use of these relatively low-resolution images in
automated analysis, exploring the ways in which they may be deemed preferable to
higher-resolution images for deep learning applications. The poor image is rich in value
in this context, as it limits the undesirable ‘noise’ of too much detail. In considering the
case of automated art authentication, this article argues that a notion of authenticity is
beginning to emerge that raises questions around Walter Benjamin’s often-cited definition
in relation to mass image culture. Copies or reproductions are now forming the basis for
a new model of authenticity, which exists latently in the formal properties of a digital
image.

Trade-offs between detail and accessibility have long been a factor in popular uptake
of competing photographic practices. In the early days of photography, negative-to-
positive printing techniques, such as the calotype, could not match the detail of
direct-positive photographic processes like daguerreotype, but what they lacked in

CONTACT Amanda Wasielewski amanda.wasielewski@abm.uu.se Institutionen för ABM, Box 625, Uppsala
751 26, Sweden

photographies, 2023
Vol. 16, No. 2, 191–210, https://doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2023.2189158
© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor &
Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/),
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any med­
ium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this
article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a
repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
192 PHOTOGRAPHIES

detail they made up for in accessibility since they were easier to copy and less fragile.1
In a similar vein, early adoption of digital photography in the 1990s and early 2000s
was driven by ease of use and speed of reproducibility/distribution, even when
weighed against the superior detail of 35 mm film photography at that time. In the
digital era, detail has become synonymous with quality. For digital photography, the
more pixels — the more detail — the better. As digital camera manufacturers
release higher and higher megapixel capabilities, however, the necessity for compro­
mise is rapidly diminishing.
The level of detail captured in a photograph is affected by a number of different
factors. For film photography, these include the size of the film, lens techniques,
issues related to chemical exposure time, and camera movement. To this mix, digital
photography added sensor size, processing power, and pixilation, the latter of which
is a reflection of the underlying structure of information in digital images as picture
elements, i.e. pixels. To say an image is ‘pixelated’ is shorthand for saying that the
image is composed of too few pixels for the human viewer to see smooth curves or
relatively high levels of detail.2 As the digital photograph is downsampled, meaning
the amount of information provided to constitute the photo is decreased, the image is
made up of fewer pixel squares and details are lost. The image or portions of the
image can thus be rendered a rectilinear abstraction within a few clicks, which has
fascinated contemporary artists such as Thomas Ruff, Angela Bulloch, Thomas
Hirschhorn, and Hito Steyerl, among many others.
In 2009 Steyerl published the influential essay ‘In Defense of the Poor Image,’
where she outlines her theory of the poor image as the digital copy of a copy unmoored
from its original, circulating quickly on the internet. The essay is a rebuke to resolution
fetishists, who value higher levels of detail above all else. In describing the poor image,
Steyerl uses a variety of negatively-loaded words: ‘bad’, ‘substandard’, ‘bastard’,
‘degraded’, ‘dilapidated’, ‘debris’.3 Steyerl’s defense, therefore, proceeds from the
popular assumption that such images are unquestionably deficient in comparison to their
higher-resolution cousins, that they are defined by what they lack. However, this does
not reflect how digital images are first and foremost machine-readable packets of
information. They are the code for processes that produce visual appearance as an
end product. Needless to say, computers ‘see’ and ‘judge’ images in ways that are
different from humans, despite the biological metaphors often used to describe their
perceptual capabilities.4 Therefore, Steyerl’s poor images might be deemed superior —
from a computational point of view — to bulky, rich images precisely because of what
they lack: excess or un-needed information.
In recent times, deep learning techniques that use neutral networks have enriched
the process of sorting and analyzing images (particularly photographic images) for
a range of applications, including facial recognition, road-obstacle detection, and
medical imaging. Popular pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for
deep learning, such as ResNet-50, VGG-16, and Inception-v3, are typically imple­
mented with images that are downscaled and cropped to a resolution of just 224 ×
224 pixels. In this article, I investigate the use of these relatively low-resolution
images in the context of training datasets for deep learning, where the poor image is
actually rich in value as it limits the undesirable ‘noise’ of too much detail for object
 AUTHENTICITY AND THE POOR IMAGE 193

recognition tasks. Looking at the case of automated art authentication, I argue that
a notion of authenticity is beginning to emerge in deep learning applications that
raises questions around Walter Benjamin’s classic conception of authenticity and aura.
Although image and screen resolutions have increased since the time Steyerl’s essay
was published, there remains a sizeable wealth gap between the lowest and highest
classes of digital images. This wealth gap is often disguised or hidden from view, as both
super rich and very poor images are automatically processed by contemporary software
to be more palatable. Unlike in the early days of the internet and personal computing,
the software that mediates what is posted online today automates the downsampling
process for very high-resolution images so that one almost never has to think about it or
experience slow image loading while browsing online. In other words, when
a photograph is uploaded to most popular social media platforms or content manage­
ment systems, it will be automatically scaled to an optimal size for web-viewing.
Additionally, most desktop software for viewing digital photographs now has automatic
anti-aliasing, which smooths the jagged edges in lower resolution or pixelated images.
This means that one rarely encounters disparities of resolution or the visible pixel.
Exposed pixels were a hallmark of the millennial period, as digital photography and the
internet grew up together, but they are less common in today’s digital landscape — at
least for human viewers.
This is not the case for machine ‘viewers’, however. Machine learning techniques,
commonly referred to as artificial intelligence (AI), are increasingly used to automate
categorization and identification tasks for large digital image datasets. For rasterized
images, such as JPEGs, GIFs, and PNGs, the analysis happens on the level of individual
pixels.5 In these applications, low-resolution images are the norm. Given that a digital
photograph is constituted programmatically, its resolution and the processing power
that instantiates and handles it are relative to one another. Heavy, big images are ‘rich’
in detail but move slowly. Light, small images are fast but of ‘poor’ quality. However,
there is no absolute measure of what high and low resolution are or what constitutes
fast processing. Behind the scenes, a calculation between processing power and image
size determines how digital images are perceived and analyzed.
Terms like detail and resolution can be difficult to define in relation to
digital images and digital photography, as they tend to signal judgement of
quality. For John Szarkowski, ‘the detail’ signals the truth content of photo­
graphy and thus, he argues, creates the conditions for its narrative incoherence.6
Although ‘detail’ may imply meaningful information, it is simply defined as
a piece or a component part of the whole, stemming from the French détailler
(to cut apart).7 This means that individual details are not necessarily unique or
materially different from one another in a given image. If we accept that a pixel
can be defined as a detail, fewer pixels mean fewer details in a digital photo­
graph. Resolution, on the other hand, is the effect of rendering component parts
or details into a distinguishable whole.8 High resolution thus means that more
details are distinguishable or resolved. One might speak of suitably high resolu­
tion for human perception, but this does not translate to suitable resolution for
automated machine analysis.
194 PHOTOGRAPHIES

Object recognition

The vast majority of machine learning applications for photographic image datasets have
been concerned not with the photograph as a whole, as an object or picture with
aesthetic qualities, but rather what information it contains or indexes. In other words,
most computational processing is concerned with who or what is depicted in the
photograph — object recognition.9 The camera becomes, in a manner of speaking, the
machinic eye of the computational system and the images it produces are what film­
maker Harun Farocki calls ‘operative images,’ which allow the computer to ‘see’ and
understand the world in its own particular way.10 Although the photographs in large-
scale training datasets like ImageNet11 and Google’s Open Images Dataset12 were
initially intended for human viewers (scraped from photo-sharing websites like
Flickr), their compilation for the purposes of machine learning have rendered them
operative.
Indeed, all digital images have the potential to be operative, given their con­
stitution in quantifiable parameters. However, in addition to these native attributes,
training datasets often provide segmentation information, which means objects
depicted within a given image are identified and labeled. This data is then used to
train the system to identify objects in any new images encountered. Foundational
labels such as these, which bridge the so-called ‘semantic gap’, need to be created
manually through crowdsourcing.13 AI researchers today have access to vast pools of
human labor through online platforms, whether they are volunteers on wikis/
institutional platforms or low-paid workers on taskwork sites like Amazon’s
Mechanical Turk. One of the early quandaries for computer scientists compiling
datasets was how to reconcile the need for large datasets with the massive amount of
labor it would take to hand-label them.14 While crowdsourcing has helped solve this
issue for researchers, the ethics of such practices are questionable.15
Used for the purposes of object recognition, a photograph becomes merely
a collection of component parts to be compared and classed by similarity with those
in other photographs. This is not unlike the systematic method of analyzing artworks
developed by Giovanni Morelli in the mid-nineteenth century, where the style in which
ears or hands were depicted by particular artists is taken as telltale signs of authorship
and authenticity [Figure 1].16 In a similar vein, one can browse the Google Open
Images Dataset with the class ‘human ear’ identified within the photographs [Figure 2]
and see a variety of ears highlighted in isolation from the rest of the body or face. Both
Morelli’s drawings and the Open Images Dataset separate the ear from the individual.
Ears become generalized objects divorced from their context as not only part of the
human body but part of a particular person’s body. This fragmented manner of reading
an image produces a very narrow understanding of what an image is.
Human and machine can only really communicate with one another via these
fragmented operations, however. By breaking the photograph into labeled objects, the
machine is able to create a translation between the information constituted as the image
and how a human might see the image. Machine learning systems can only determine
patterns in pixels, they do not know what, for example, a dog is without a human-
given label. This is why training is necessary. The more patterns of dogs labeled in the
 AUTHENTICITY AND THE POOR IMAGE 195

Fig. 1. Illustration for Italian Painters (1892) by Giovanni Morelli. Source: Wikimedia Commons,
public domain.

Fig. 2. Screen capture of Google Open Images Dataset (https://storage.googleapis.com/openimages/web/visua

lizer/index.html). Source: Google.
196 PHOTOGRAPHIES

training data, the more likely it is the computer can begin labeling new images on its
own and recognize the variety of patterns a human might identify as a dog. Once again,
though, the machine’s capacity is seemingly limited by the collective human labelers’
ability to recognize a particular object in an image. This tangled web of object,
representation, and understanding is reminiscent of René Magritte’s famous semiotic
puzzle in La Trahison des Images (1929), where images, words, and the things they
represent are flattened in our comprehension. For a machine looking at an image, the
collection of pixels is ‘dog’, but it has no comprehension of the concept of a dog
beyond that, given the limited scope of its operations.
Object recognition exercises in machine learning also highlight the importance of
what James Elkins calls ‘the surround’ in photography. Elkins uses this term to
differentiate between background, which he associates with painting and describes as
intentional, and the incidental nature of what is depicted in a photograph besides the
intended subject.17 A human might differentiate between a photograph of a dog and
a photograph that merely has a dog in it. Training data makes no such distinctions.
For example, when browsing the Google Open Images Dataset category of dog, I hit
upon a photograph that struck me as peculiar. In the photo [Figure 3], four people are
pictured holding up signs protesting the Iraq War. The man on the far right is
accompanied by a dog, sitting in the grass beside him. Given that the dataset identifies
the dog in the photo, it is segmented and called up within that category [Figure 4],
even though the presence of the dog is incidental. By labeling every recognizable
object or element in a photograph, machine learning training sets understand the
photograph in what might be termed a highly democratized way. It is flattened into
a collection of objects to label, rather than a cohesive whole or a composition with

Fig. 3. Photograph of protestors at “Atlanta Veto Rally” on May 2, 2007. Photo: Mike Schinkel
via Flickr, CC by 2.0.
 AUTHENTICITY AND THE POOR IMAGE 197

Fig. 4. Screen capture of Google Open Images Dataset (https://storage.googleapis.com/openimages/web/visua

lizer/index.html). Source: Google.

relational meaning. Google Open Images Dataset does provide some relational data
for the objects in any given photograph but, at present, it is nothing more compli­
cated than ‘woman playing guitar’ or ‘table is wooden’.18 Highly subjective deter­
minations, such as my assertion that the dog in the protest photo is not very
important to the scene as a whole, would be difficult for a dataset to codify other
than through taking a survey of people’s opinions.
Although it may seem self-evident to a human viewer, the undifferentiated
nature of machine vision at the pixel level means that machine learning may not
grasp the concept of foreground and background (or subject and surround). There
is a popular urban legend in AI circles, known as the tank classifier problem, that
illustrates this point.19 As the story goes, US government researchers training
a neural network to categorize different types of US and Soviet tanks found that
they had accidentally categorized all the tanks pictured on cloudy days together
and all those on sunny days in a different category. It turned out that the neural
net was classifying based on background weather conditions rather than the tanks
themselves. While this story may be apocryphal, there are plenty of documented
cases where neural nets have classified images by incidental details or even by the
photographic or imaging equipment rather than the image itself. For example,
researchers reviewing recent AI applications on medical imaging designed to
detect COVID-19 cases were using healthy lung scans of children to train their
AI and therefore ended up categorizing by children versus adults rather than cases
of COVID-19.20 Another study, meanwhile, found that the labels and background
detail (produced by the imaging equipment) in the image of lung scans could
skew COVID-19 detection.21 This highlights how, apart from confusions between
image background and foreground, as a human might define it, there are issues of
classification by production methods that a human may not be aware of. For
example, a classifier may find more commonalities at the pixel level between
198 PHOTOGRAPHIES

pictures taken with the same camera in the same format than those with the same
or similar objects taken on different devices.22
Machine vision is thus highly indiscriminate. Given both the composition and the
context implied by the Iraq War protesters and their signs in Figure 3, a human may
barely note the presence of a dog. The computer, on the other hand, will treat all
objects the same if it is asked to complete an object recognition task. It will merely
recognize each and every collection of pixels in the photograph that it has been
trained to ‘see’ as objects. It does not make any differentiation whether some are
more important than others — unless it has been guided to do so by humans in the
process of training.
The fact that photography, a seemingly dispassionate mechanical procedure,
captured both relevant and incidental details of a particular object of observation
raised questions regarding its utility for scientific illustration in the nineteenth
century.23 Clarifying drawings or diagrams were sometimes needed to make sense
of early scientific photography, which might also be clouded by artifacts from the
technical process.24 The understanding of photographs as both too indiscriminate and
too specific was thus a facet of debates in the sciences around the adoption of
photography.25 Scientific drawing traditionally depicts a generalized exemplar of
the subject matter at hand, distilled from its most common characteristics. For
example, a drawing of a flower of a particular species of plant would need to be
generalized to reflect the entire species rather than one particular plant. Given this,
photographs were deemed less useful at first since they only showed one plant in
highly specific detail, not a generalized prototypical plant.26 According to Lorraine
Daston and Peter Galison, ‘Failure to discriminate between essential and accurate
detail’ would have been taken ‘as signs of incompetence’ for atlas makers in the
eighteenth century, whereas the indiscriminate quality of photography later became
a sought-after ideal.27
It could be said that, like the atlas makers, machine learning algorithms create
generalized models for object identification. When there is not enough training
data, a model may be in danger of overfitting, meaning that not enough general­
izations are made between different individuals of a similar type and, so, each
individual is isolated in a category of its own. For example, if the system does not
have enough dog training data, a Saint Bernard and a Chihuahua may be classed as
separate objects rather than two dogs. In order to provide ‘accurate’ general­
izations, photographs must be broken up or fragmented into component objects
and these objects must be simple enough to avoid overfitting. In other words, the
detail that might satisfy a human viewer may be nothing other than distracting
noise for the machine. Too much detail might make each image too different
from one another and therefore not sufficiently generalizable. For this reason,
downsampled images often perform better in classification tasks than highly
detailed images.
 AUTHENTICITY AND THE POOR IMAGE 199

Information and connoisseurship

A photograph from 1955 shows art historian Bernard Berenson holding up

a magnifying glass with his face pressed close to a painting in the Borghese Gallery
in Rome [Figure 5]. The methods of analysis that look to stylistic details of artworks
to ascertain their authenticity or attribution are now known in the field of art history

Fig. 5. Bernard Berenson looking at a painting with a magnifying glass at the Borghese
Gallery, Rome, Italy, 1955. Photo: David Seymour/Magnum Photos.

Fig. 6. Bernard Berenson (1865–1959), 1957. Photo: David Lees Photography Archive/Bridgeman
Images.
200 PHOTOGRAPHIES

as connoisseurship, named for those early amateurs of art who sought to understand
artworks through close inspection and comparison. The aforementioned techniques of
Giovanni Morelli were some of the most influential methods of connoisseurship,
widely used by art historians in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Although
direct viewing of the works was, of course, important for Berenson, he also relied
heavily on photographic reproductions to conduct his research [Figure 6] and main­
tained an extensive photographic archive.28
Berenson’s methods of art analysis are not dissimilar from the way machine
learning systems analyze the details of a digital photograph, attending to one small
area at a time. A scholar like Berenson would have trained his brain, through viewing
as many artworks as possible, to recognize certain patterns and characteristics as
belonging to a certain artist or school. When he approached a new artwork or —
more likely — a photographic reproduction of an artwork, he would be able to recall
this training and make a judgement regarding authenticity or attribution based on his
previous experience. Likewise, deep learning systems must be trained to understand
the patterns that identify a particular artwork as attributable to a certain artist or
school before they can then identify a new photographic reproduction of an artwork
as belonging to a known category. Despite these similarities, however, there are key
differences between connoisseurship, exemplified by Berenson’s close viewing, and
the way machine vision operates.
Deep learning systems trained on digital images ‘see’ the image as the measurable
characteristics of its pixels. From within this pixel information, ‘features’ are
extracted, for example, color, luminance, gradients, edges, textures, etc. What
makes deep learning deep is the relative number of layers in the system, some of
which extract low-level features (for example, edges of an object) that then con­
tribute to the extraction of higher-level features (for example, different looking
objects that are all called ‘apple’). In other words, deep learning produces more
sophisticated analysis of images automatically, as higher-level features are learned
based on lower-level features. This saves the computer programmer time trialing
different ‘hand-crafted’ feature extraction methods to suit the task at hand.
Additionally, machine learning analyzes the characteristics of the digital image
first, not the qualities of the artwork. In other words, unlike Berenson, the machine
does not know that the image is a photographic reproduction of, for example,
a painted altarpiece and it cannot extrapolate the material qualities of the object
from the photograph. It only knows that it is a digital image. This is an important
distinction to make, as deep learning systems are often trained on and operate using
low resolution images, so the distance of the representation from the object it
represents is exaggerated. The readily visible surface and design characteristics of
a painting or drawing are preserved but other aspects of its materiality are largely
lost. Higher resolution images can only be analyzed piecemeal as small samplings of
the larger image composition, whereas lower resolution images capture more of the
overall pattern. To illustrate this, Figure 7 shows a 10 × 10 pixel segment of an
image — a common convolutional layer size — extracted from an image of the same
artwork (a portrait of King Henry VIII of England) scaled to 16 × 16 pixels and
224 × 224 pixels. As evident, the former sample includes much more of the general
 AUTHENTICITY AND THE POOR IMAGE 201

Fig. 7. A 10 x 10 pixel segment from a 16 x 16 pixel image, a 10 x 10 pixel segment from a 224 x 224 pixel image,
Portrait of Henry VIII (16th century) by the circle of Hans Holbein the Younger. Images: author, Photo: Wikimedia
Commons, public domain.

compositional form of the image, while the latter only shows a detail of Henry VIII’s
mustache.
This is a simplified example, of course, since the feature detection (and eventual
object recognition) tasks performed by a deep CNN depend on the size of the
receptive field, which is the area within that input image that help define or produce
a particular feature.29 A feature is a characteristic of the image that is automatically
determined by the neural network based on a certain area of the image, so it would
be helpful to know exactly how much of the image the neural net is looking at.
According to Araujo et. al., the larger the receptive field, the more accurate the
classification task: ‘large receptive fields are necessary for high-level recognition tasks,
but with diminishing rewards.’30 This means that an expanded receptive field, which
effectively includes all the input pixels in the output feature map, may not have that
much or, indeed, any advantage over a smaller one.
In essence, most image-based applications of deep learning will have a sweet spot
for ideal resolution which is not equivalent to the highest resolution possible. More
pixels after this point do not produce better results. Sabbottke et. al., in investigating
the best performing resolution for radiography, explain:

Achieving better model performance with lower input image resolutions might
initially seem paradoxical, but, in various machine learning paradigms, a reduced
number of inputs or features is desirable as a means of lowering the number of
parameters that must be optimized, which in turn diminishes the risk of model
overfitting.31

As their study shows, for the disease diagnostic applications they investigate, perfor­
mance plateaus at around 224 × 224 pixel images. Of course, resolution and recep­
tive field are not the only factors in determining deep learning performance, but it is
important to note that there is a perceptual ceiling above which more information,
i.e. more detail, just becomes noise.
202 PHOTOGRAPHIES

In the late 1940s, Claude E. Shannon published his groundbreaking mathematical

theory of communication, wherein he theorized the quantification of information
using a unit of measurement called the bit.32 Among many other important aspects of
Shannon’s work, it demonstrates the gap between information and meaning. In
a noteworthy passage of his article, Shannon describes how one can generate
English language text based on the relationship between letters and their frequency
to one another at higher orders (using so-called n-grams). Although the text that he
produced consisted of English words, it was complete nonsense to read. That is, the
text produced was just a collection of words, not a sequence with meaning.33 Warren
E. Weaver surmised in relation to Shannon’s theory, ‘One has the vague feeling that
information and meaning may prove to be something like a pair of canonically
conjugate variables in quantum theory, they being subject to some joint restriction
that condemns a person to the sacrifice of the one as he insists on having much of the
other.’34 In the communication systems Shannon described, noise is also a quantity of
information and, so, in order for something to be meaningful, it may actually require
less information, i.e. less noise.35 The more noise, the more information, and there­
fore the more difficulty in understanding the meaning of the message.
Given that, as noted, the vast majority of machine learning application on images
were developed for recognizing objects in photographs, it makes sense that lower
resolution images would function just as well if not better than more detailed higher
resolution images. The simplified forms of lower resolution images may show all the
information necessary to identify, for example, an apple or a dog. As applications of
deep learning on images move away from classic object recognition tasks in standard
photographic images, however, the optimal resolution remains an open question.
Learnings from object recognition tasks are regularly applied to a variety of
contexts. This is known as ‘transfer learning’. In the case of medical imaging, for
instance, smaller details may be necessary for diagnosing illness but are often left
out.36 As stated in the above-cited review of COVID-19 research, ‘Many publications
used the same resolutions such as 224-by-224 or 256-by-256 for training, which are
often used for ImageNet classification, indicating that the pre-trained model dictated
the image rescaling used rather than clinical judgement.’37 Transfer learning is
similarly influenced by pre-trained models when applied to photographic reproduc­
tions of artworks.
Art authentication using deep learning not only presents an issue in terms of the
difference in image content/image type but also in terms of task. Although repro­
duced as digital photographs, images of artworks have a general appearance that is not
indexical in relation to the motif or contents of the work itself.38 In the absence of
material analysis, given the digital nature of the images, authenticity of artworks via
deep learning can only be determined by its formal properties. A machine must
therefore be taught how to detect style. Object recognition in the traditional sense
does not aid in authenticating artworks, but certain details of a work of art — and
their recognition — may tip off an automated system as to whether the work is
genuine, just as the details of an ear were the telltale sign of authorship for Morelli.
 AUTHENTICITY AND THE POOR IMAGE 203

Model of authenticity

AI has been hyped as a game-changing new tool in the art authenticator’s toolbox.39 In
light of this, a notion of authenticity is beginning to emerge that raises questions around
Walter Benjamin’s often-cited definition of authenticity in relation to mass image
culture. For Benjamin, the authenticity of a work of art is tied to the ‘here and now
of the original’ whereas the films and photographs (including reproductions of art­
works) circulating in his time were cut loose from this spaciotemporal mooring.40
Following from Steyerl’s concept of the poor image, however, one could say that the
low-resolution digital images used for deep learning today are divorced from the here
and now to, perhaps, an even greater extent than the reproductions of Benjamin’s time.
Nevertheless, these copies or reproductions are now forming the basis for a new model
of authenticity, which exists latently in the formal properties of a digital image.
Authenticity, therefore, is divined from the pool of data and emerges from masses of
images rather than from the aura of a singular original.
Authenticity in the age of deep learning must be quantitatively verified rather than
qualitatively felt. Benjamin argued that authenticity ‘eludes technological — and of
course not only technological — reproduction.’41 Deep learning raises the specter of
authenticity as manifested in not only reproductions but poor reproductions. While the
statistical turn of modernity did not go unnoted by Benjamin, he could not have
foreseen the emergence of another notion of the divine and another kind of aura
emerging from masses of reproductions.42 There is a growing sense that the algorithmic
processes that digest our digital data trails can predict our wants and needs before we
have even thought of them ourselves. Somehow ‘the algorithms’ seem to divine
a reality, an authenticity that is deeper than our conscious thoughts, almost as if they
reveal an underlying truth beyond perception. Benjamin coined the term ‘optical
unconscious’ to describe a mechanical process (photography) that reveals something
outside of the ‘normal spectrum of sense impressions.’43 Although he did not exten­
sively develop this term, other scholars have subsequently expanded on his proposition
that photography helps reveal the imperceptible.44 Just as Benjamin spoke of an optical
unconscious, there seems to be a growing belief in an algorithmic unconscious manifest
in contemporary machine learning applications.45 For Benjamin, the loss of art’s aura
and authenticity was a positive development — it could be freed from its ‘parasitic
subservience to ritual.’46 The rise of computational methods in the study of art,
however, introduces a new concept of aura in the form of machine divination.
How deep learning comes to the conclusions it does is often not known, i.e. it is
a black box. Typically, one can only determine the ‘accuracy’ of the results not the
how or why those conclusions were reached. Given the methods of data analysis at
our disposal and the mass digitization projects that have thus far been completed, the
alignment of ‘reality’ or ‘truth’ with the masses has been augmented to such an
extent that it disappears. We feel that we need to sift the data to rediscover the
reality embedded in it and, for that, we depend on automated sorting processes.
Deep learning models for analysis of art and its authenticity proceed as if artworks are
like flowers of the same species, both of which have a generalized form. In other
words, to be authentic is to be average. The unique original is effectively invisible. Of
204 PHOTOGRAPHIES

course, neither a generalized flower nor a generalized artwork exists. Indeed,

generalizations as applied to human beings have had consequences ranging from
cruel to catastrophically evil.47 Nevertheless, aura may be lost in a single reproduc­
tion but a new aura — a new concept of authenticity — is in the masses. The here
and now is thus latent in these countless poor images, which otherwise seem so
distant from their origins.
Further complicating matters, the rasterization of digital images has created an
inbuilt fragmentation of whatever is reproduced or represented photographically.
This fragmentation is often noted as an essential quality of digital media, which sets it
apart from the supposed continuity of analog media.48 However, within the black box
of the artificial neural network, there is additional unseen fragmentation as pieces of
the image are attached to neurons and ‘carried’ through the processing layers. As is
the case in the above example, it would be useful to know exactly what the system is
basing its categorization on. Feature visualizations are one tool that has been develop
to try to understand this.49 What feature visualizations often reveal is that the image
in deep learning is never understood as a whole, even if it seems to enter the system
that way. Images fragments are grabbed and scrambled in a way that makes sense to
the system in delivering its output, and these rarely reflect how humans understand
the same image. Categorization, though it may address the whole, never therefore
truly comprehends or synthesizes the entirety of an image but rather treats granular,
incidental, and fragmented elements.

Conclusion

By treating images as operative, deep learning applications expose the digital image
for what it is: functional, quantitative information. Digital images are not continuous
wholes or self-contained objects, as humans are wont to perceive them, but rather
fragmented data that is continually reconstituted. As human viewers crave ever-
higher resolution for digital images and screens, it is worth reflecting on how
additional resolution or detail may just be noise to the growing number of machine
‘viewers’ dealing with these images. Benjamin’s optimism regarding the political
potential of reproductive media, particularly film, which banishes aura and ritual to
the past, is echoed in Steyerl’s conception of the poor image as politically radical. Just
as Benjamin’s reproductions are freed from ritual function, Steyerl’s poor images are
freed from their status as mere copies: ‘The poor image is no longer about the real
thing — the original original. Instead it is about its own real conditions of existence
[. . .] In short: it is about reality.’50 Reduced to mere reproduction, seen as a shadow
of something like an artwork, the poor image is by definition a poor replacement,
a substandard stand-in. However, digital images — chief among them photographic
images — are rapidly being turned over to a purely operative role. Machines are
taking over image interpretation due to the sheer volume we seek to order and
understand. Understood as machinic divination, AI places aura within the mass of data
and the poor image thus becomes the information or the quantification of the world
that the original lacks.
 AUTHENTICITY AND THE POOR IMAGE 205

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes
1. Frizot, “1839–1840 Photographic Developments,” 27–28; Trachtenberg, Classic
Essays on Photography, 27–28.
2. A digital photograph of any resolution is, of course, pixelated, i.e. composed of
individual picture elements (pixels). However, the term ‘pixelated’ is now
synonymous with visible pixels.
3. Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” 1.
4. Cobb, The Idea of the Brain; Lindsay, Models of the Mind. It should be noted that the
distinctions drawn between human and machine vision here are not meant to
signal an absolute binary division between man and machine more generally. The
human and nonhuman are, of course, deeply intertwined. See Grusin, The
Nonhuman Turn.
5. Palmer, “The Rhetoric of the JPEG.”
6. Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye, 8–9.
7. “Detail, v.1.”
8. “Resolution, n.1.”
9. For a longer discussion of object recognition tasks in relation to artworks, including
a discussion of facial recognition tasks, see Wasielewski, Computational Formalism: Art
History and Machine Learning.
10. Farocki, “Phantom Images”; Ehmann and Eshun, “A to Z of HF or: 26
Introductions to HF,” 211.
11. “ImageNet.”
12. “Open Images V6.”
13. Howe, “The Rise of Crowdsourcing.”
14. Colombo, Del Bimbo, and Pala, “Semantics in Visual Information Retrieval,” 38.
15. Terranova, “Free Labor”; Crawford and Paglen, “Excavating AI.”
16. Morelli, Italian Painters. For commentary on Morellian methods from the point of
view of digital humanities methods, see Langmead et al., “Leonardo, Morelli, and
the Computational Mirror.”
17. Elkins, What Photography Is, 116–17.
18. “Open Images V6 - Description.”
19. Branwen, “The Neural Net Tank Urban Legend.”
20. Roberts et al., “Common Pitfalls and Recommendations,” 211.
21. Maguolo and Nanni, “A Critic Evaluation of Methods for COVID-19.”
22. Noord, Hendriks, and Postma, “Toward Discovery of the Artist’s Style,” 53.
23. Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 109.
24. Tucker, Nature Exposed, 233.
25. This is not to mention the conflicting opinions over whether early photography
was more art or science, given on one hand the lack of color and ability to capture
movement and, on the other, the detail captured. See Batchen, Burning with Desire:
The Conception of Photography, 137–38.
206 PHOTOGRAPHIES

26. Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 109.

27. Daston and Galison, 186.
28. Israëls, “The Berensons, Photography, and the Discovery of Sassetta’; Pagliarulo,
‘Photographs to Read: Berensonian Annotations.”
29. Araujo, Norris, and Sim, “Computing Receptive Fields of Convolutional Neural
Networks.”
30. Ibid.
31. Sabottke and Spieler, “The Effect of Image Resolution on Deep Learning in
Radiography,’ 1.
32. Shannon, “The Mathematical Theory of Communication,” 32.
33. Ibid., 43–44.
34. Weaver, “Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication,” 27.
35. Ibid., 19.
36. Geras et al., “High-Resolution Breast Cancer Screening,” 2.
37. Roberts et al., “Common Pitfalls,” 210.
38. For a discussion of how digital images problematize the indexicality of photo­
graphy, see Rubenstein and Sluis, “The Digital Image in Photographic Culture.”
39. Batycka, “We Were Blown Away.”
40. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 21.
41. Ibid., 21.
42. Ibid., 24.
43. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” and
“Little History of Photography,” 37–28, 278.
44. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious; Smith and Sliwinski, eds., Photography and the
Optical Unconscious.
45. For a psychoanalytical perspective on this idea, see Possati, “Algorithmic Unconscious:
Why Psychoanalysis Helps in Understanding AI.” This naturally raises questions
around what, then, is algorithmic consciousness. One must exercise caution in this
realm, however. As Emily M. Bender argues, machine learning language systems are
designed to ‘abuse our empathy’ and lead us to believe they are conscious or sentient.
46. Ibid., 24.
47. Tagg and Sekula famously explored the relationship between photography and
(state) power, particularly as an aid to the racist and eugenics classification of
human beings.
48. Lunenfeld, “Introduction: Screen Grabs,” xv.
49. Zhang and Zhu, “Visual Interpretability for Deep Learning”; Offert, “Images of
Image Machines”; Gonthier, Gousseau, and Ladjal, “An Analysis of the Transfer
Learning of Convolutional Neural Networks for Artistic Images.”
50. Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” 8.

Funding

The work was supported by the Vetenskapsrådet [2018-06057].

 AUTHENTICITY AND THE POOR IMAGE 207

ORCID

Amanda Wasielewski http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3034-0757

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Amanda Wasielewski is Associate Senior Lecturer of Digital Humanities and Associate

Professor (Docent) of Art History at Uppsala University. Her writing and research investigate
the use of digital technology in relation to art/visual culture and spatial practice. Her recent
focus has been on the use of artificial intelligence techniques for the analysis and creation of
art and other visual media. She is in the Metadata Culture research group at Stockholm
University as part of the project “Sharing the Visual Heritage: Metadata, Reuse, and
Interdisciplinary Research.” Wasielewski is the author of three monographs: Made in
Brooklyn: Artists, Hipsters, Makers, Gentrifiers (Zero, 2018), From City Space to Cyberspace:
Art, Squatting, and Internet Culture in the Netherlands (Amsterdam University Press, 2021),
and Computational Formalism: Art History and Machine Learning (MIT Press, 2023).