From Index to Algorithm. Photography, Generative Imagery, and Emerging Visual Regime (2018–2025)

Abstract

This article presents the findings of a scoping review examining how academic literature from 2018 to 2025 has addressed the relationship between photography and artificial intelligence. Using the Arksey and O’Malley (2005) framework, the review mapped the categories, practices, and concepts mobilized by visual studies, sociosemiotics, and media philosophy to account for the transformations that generative AI introduces into the photographic visual regime. Results are organized across five thematic axes—memory, verisimilitude and veracity, visual regime, technological hybridization, and emerging concepts—tracing both continuities and ruptures between the photographic tradition and new algorithmic visual production. The review identifies twenty recently coined concepts including algorithmic postmemory, mean images, nonhuman photography, perception machine, algorithmic index, larval memories, virtual photography, and promptography. The analysis reveals that AI amplifies certain tensions already inherent to photography—such as the negotiation between the indexical and the symbolic-cultural, or between document and fiction—while also introducing discontinuities not previously seen: the displacement of the trace toward statistical probability, the absence of individual authorship, the disappearance of the optical referent, and the use of generative imagery as a means for memory restoration.