ABOUT

To celebrate their 90th anniversary, San Francisco Ballet had commissioned a series of dances called Next @ 90. The work was meant to show a break from tradition. I was hired to photograph a select group of their dancers. To show the idea of NEXT and the move away from classical staging I choose to combine studio images of the dancers with backgrounds created with the AI tool Mid-Journey. The generated backgrounds all started with the key word “arch”. I chose the arch motif to represent the theater’s proscenium arch.

Creating the backgrounds was not as quick or simple as one would imagine. The AI tools and my skills evolved during the process. I found that the ability to iterate was endless but the ability to direct the machine is overstated - the results are more random than most people understand. I also found that the generated images contain artifacts that presented a lot of extra work and cost in the retouching process. The AI tools are evolving so fast that any review of their flaws is instantly outdated.