FOTODOKS
Festival for contemporary
documentary photography
FOTODOKS
Festival for contemporary documentary photography

Sander Coers 

POST, 2023-24

POST is a photo series by Sander Coers which expands the ostensibly epistemic structure of documentary photography as a media genre. The fact that some of the pictures on show have been generated through artificial intelligence seems to run counter to the spirit of authenticity which is so intrinsic to documentary photography. In this project, Coers has focused on the life of his grandfather, who was born in Indonesia during the Second World War. He approaches a part of his family’s history that is shrouded in mystery by appropriating the amateur snaps from his grandparents’ photo albums. The data they contain serves as material for training a computer to generate pictorial spaces, thereby forming the basis for speculatively visualising historical gaps. Yet it is precisely these supposedly authentic ‘shots’ that trigger a certain unease: just like the human memory, where our experiences are constantly being re-evaluated and reinterpreted after the fact, Coers’s photo series, which has an almost filmic quality to it, creates an idyllic landscape that oscillates between fact and fiction, permeated by stereotypical images of masculinity and simulated recollections.

 

Website:

https://sandercoers.com/

Sander Coers 

POST, 2023-24

POST is a photo series by Sander Coers which expands the ostensibly epistemic structure of documentary photography as a media genre. The fact that some of the pictures on show have been generated through artificial intelligence seems to run counter to the spirit of authenticity which is so intrinsic to documentary photography. In this project, Coers has focused on the life of his grandfather, who was born in Indonesia during the Second World War. He approaches a part of his family’s history that is shrouded in mystery by appropriating the amateur snaps from his grandparents’ photo albums. The data they contain serves as material for training a computer to generate pictorial spaces, thereby forming the basis for speculatively visualising historical gaps. Yet it is precisely these supposedly authentic ‘shots’ that trigger a certain unease: just like the human memory, where our experiences are constantly being re-evaluated and reinterpreted after the fact, Coers’s photo series, which has an almost filmic quality to it, creates an idyllic landscape that oscillates between fact and fiction, permeated by stereotypical images of masculinity and simulated recollections.

 

Website:

https://sandercoers.com/