PHOTOGRAPHY AS RECONSTRUCTION: The Ontology of the Image, Intentional Fidelity, and the Genealogy of Photography in the Post-AI Era

The rise of generative artificial intelligence and computational photography poses a fundamental challenge to photography’s status as a technology of representation. Popular discourse frequently treats AI as a threat to photographic ontology, as though a single sharp divide separated the “authentic photograph” from the “machine-made image”. This article rejects that dichotomy. It argues that AI does not introduce a self-contained ontological discontinuity; rather, it intensifies a shift in the image’s mode of existence and epistemic conditions that began when digital photography converted sensor responses into numerical data. Bringing the realist tradition (Bazin, Barthes, Dubois) into dialogue with the transparency tradition in analytic aesthetics (Walton, Lopes, Costello), post-photographic media theory (Mitchell, Flusser, Sontag, Benjamin), and recent scholarship on photography and AI (Zylinska, Hausken, Wasielewski, Ogundipe, Bañuelos-Capistrán), the article develops two central concepts. Photography as reconstruction understands the digital photographic image as a computational reconstruction from optical data rather than a reproduction of reality. Intentional fidelity holds that photographic fidelity in the post-AI era concerns not only the image’s relation to the recorded object, but also its correspondence to an aesthetic intention reasonably attributable to the photographer. These concepts are tested against Boris Eldagsen’s refusal of an award at the 2023 Sony World Photography Awards and Samsung’s “moongate” controversy. The analysis yields a two-condition criterion of demarcation: an optical capture must be present in the image’s causal history, and the relevant content of the output must remain substantively dependent upon information supplied by that capture. An objections-and-replies section then tests the framework against contemporary revisionist positions. The central question of post-AI photography is therefore no longer simply whether an image is real, but how the relationships among captured reality, recorded data, computational reconstruction, and photographic intention can be made epistemically transparent. Keywords: digital photography; post-AI photography; photography as reconstruction; intentional