The photographer’s new book, Aura: Collaborations with Human and Other Minds 2011-2023, asks what happens when images are everywhere yet seem to hold less and less?
What does a photographer do when the photograph begins to feel like the problem? For Norbert Schoerner, the answer took over a decade to fully materialise, arriving in the form of a book containing no photographs taken by him at all. Aura: Collaborations with Human and Other Minds 2011-2023, published by False Glance, brings together four discrete bodies of work, each probing a different dimension of the same persistent question: what happens to images, and to us, when images are everywhere yet seem to hold less and less?
Around 2011 and 2012, Schoerner found himself transfixed by the updated Google Image Search grid – its particular, slightly uncanny layout; the way results bled from the precise to the oblique. “It was a complete impending overflow,” he recalls, “and that somehow led me to question my practice. What could be the point of making another image and just adding to that flood?” At the same time, he had just wrapped Third Life, his acclaimed book with Violette Editions and Thames & Hudson. But rather than reaching for the camera again, he chose to take his practice apart entirely.
Working with Amazon Mechanical Turk – a crowdsourced labour platform whose very name echoes one of technology’s oldest sleights of hand – Schoerner distributed a database of found images to anonymous online workers, each returning between five and ten written descriptions per image. These ranged from the monosyllabic and literal to the richly embellished, revealing as much about their authors as about the images themselves. Some catalogued methodically, almost “painting by numbers”; others bypassed the literal entirely, instinctively reading the emotional temperature of a scene. Once the responses were in, he deleted the source images – and hasn’t returned to them since – spending around a month doing what he calls “semantic layering”: collating and recombining the descriptions until the original photograph became less a record of fact than a catalyst for imagination.
In deleting the images, the project begins to turn on itself, touching on something Schoerner has been circling since first encountering Baudrillard in the early 2000s: the tension between representation and simulation. He is careful to stress this isn’t about gatekeeping, but about how images are increasingly processed without being absorbed – producing simulations rather than responses; performing within parameters of audience legibility rather than expressing anything genuinely felt. “We’ve lost a true sense of self,” he says. And if that felt like a creeping cultural malaise in 2011, the decade that followed proved him right.
When people ask Schoerner about his relationship with AI (and they inevitably do), his answer remains rather unresolved. He uses it pragmatically and finds certain applications genuinely thrilling, but his deeper unease is harder to shake. “The horse had already bolted long before anyone was calling it out,” he says. What troubles him most is not the technology itself but its social consequences: the way it runs on systems set by a rapidly expanding technological complex, even as it narrows the language through which we understand the world.
The final chapter of Aura, Charming Carcass, arrives at a kind of logical terminus: a feedback loop in which the AI describes its own outputs, generating prompt-style language from images it has itself produced. It was here that Schoerner found both a conclusion and a new preoccupation: model collapse – the phenomenon whereby an AI trained solely on its own data eventually plateaus, unable to develop further. Whether Aura itself will continue remains genuinely open. “I probably felt like that after every single chapter,” he laughs.
Drawn from Walter Benjamin’s concept of the irreducible presence of the original work – lost, he argued, in reproduction – the title is less homage than reappraisal. Where Benjamin traced the aura’s disappearance with ambivalence, Schoerner has spent over a decade dismantling the very idea of the original: voluntarily discarding source images, feeding descriptions into machines, letting language and algorithm erode any stable notion of the first thing. But as his artist’s note, quoting John Cage, puts it: “the principle underlying all the solutions are the questions we ask.”
Aura: Collaborations with Human and Other Minds 2011-2023 by Norbert Schoerner is published in a limited edition of 200 by False Glance and is out now.
