Vanessa Rusci -London Gallery - Photography After Photography: Image, Archetype and Artificial Intelligence
- Celine F.
- Oct 20, 2025
- 6 min read
Photography After Photography: Image, Archetype and Artificial Intelligence
Writer: NNC GalleryNNC Gallery London
What happens to photography when the photograph is no longer the final image?
This question runs through the recent artistic research of Vanessa Rusci, Italian visual artist, photographer and independent curator whose practice has developed across photography, contemporary art, visual communication and, more recently, artificial intelligence.
For Rusci, photography is increasingly a point of departure rather than an arrival.
She photographs real people, bodies, places and situations. But the photographic act can subsequently enter a longer process of transformation: digital intervention, artificial intelligence, recomposition, printing, physical manipulation and the application of materials such as gold leaf.
The original photograph survives, but it changes status.
It becomes memory, evidence, raw material and trace.
The result belongs to a territory in which the boundaries between photography, digital image, material artwork and generative processes become increasingly unstable.
And it is precisely within this instability that Rusci has chosen to work.
A Practice Rooted in Photography
Before artificial intelligence entered her artistic vocabulary, there was photography.
Rusci trained at Fabrizio Ferri's Università dell'Immagine in Milan, where photography was understood not simply as technical production but as a language connected to perception, communication and the construction of meaning.
Her subsequent professional and artistic experience developed across different areas of visual culture, from commissioned photography and communication to teaching, artistic research and curatorial practice.
This background is significant.
Rusci does not approach artificial intelligence as someone attempting to replace photography with a new technology.
She approaches it as a photographer questioning what photography can become.
The distinction matters.
From the Photograph to the Hyper-Image
Photography has never been completely neutral.
The photographer chooses the frame, the moment, the distance, the light and what remains outside the image.
Digital photography extended those possibilities.
Artificial intelligence has radically expanded them again.
A photograph can now become the origin of an image that never existed exactly as we see it, while still retaining a relationship with something — or someone — that existed in front of a camera.
Rusci's research inhabits this threshold.
Her interest is not primarily in producing spectacular AI-generated images. It lies in investigating what happens when human intention, photographic memory and computational prediction coexist inside the same work.
Who is creating?
Where does the photograph end?
When does another image begin?
What remains of the original subject after algorithmic transformation?
And how much of the final work belongs to the machine when the entire process has been initiated, selected, directed, rejected, reconstructed and materially completed by an artist?
These questions have become central to contemporary visual culture.
For Rusci, they are artistic material.
Hyper Photography
Within this research, Rusci has explored the idea of Hyper Photography: a photographic practice that extends beyond the traditional boundaries of the photographic image.
The camera records one layer of reality.
The artist can then activate other layers — memory, fiction, historical reference, algorithmic transformation, material intervention.
Photography therefore no longer functions exclusively as evidence of what stood before the lens.
It becomes a point of contact between what existed, what is remembered, what is imagined and what can now be computationally reconstructed.
The photographic image becomes expanded.
Not because technology automatically makes it richer, but because the artist uses technology to question the limits of representation itself.
Photographing People, Transforming Them into Archetypes
Another important dimension of Rusci's recent work concerns myth and archetype.
She photographs contemporary people and subsequently transforms them into figures connected to ancient mythologies and symbolic systems.
The individual does not disappear completely.
Instead, the contemporary body becomes the temporary home of something much older.
A woman photographed today can become a goddess.
A face can become an archetype.
A contemporary portrait can enter into dialogue with a symbolic figure that has survived for thousands of years.
The operation is not intended as historical reconstruction.
Rusci is interested in reactivating the archetype.
What can an ancient figure tell us in 2026?
What happens when mythology encounters ecological crisis, technology, artificial intelligence or contemporary ideas of identity?
Why do certain symbols continue to return across cultures and centuries?
In these works, the past is not nostalgia.
It becomes a tool for examining the present.
Gold as Transformation
Gold leaf appears repeatedly within this research.
It would be easy to interpret it simply as an aesthetic device.
But its function is more complex.
Gold has accompanied sacred images, power, ritual, alchemy and transcendence across different cultures and historical periods.
Applied to a contemporary photographic or digitally transformed image, it creates a collision between different temporalities.
The computational image — apparently immaterial, infinitely reproducible, generated through data — encounters an ancient material applied manually to a physical surface.
Algorithm and hand.
Pixel and matter.
Prediction and ritual.
The digital image returns to being an object.
This tension is central to Rusci's work.
The Artist and the Algorithm
Rusci's relationship with artificial intelligence is deliberately critical.
She neither rejects the technology nor accepts the idea that technological innovation is automatically cultural progress.
Instead, she investigates the responsibilities that emerge when artists begin working with systems capable of generating images from enormous quantities of existing visual culture.
Artificial intelligence introduces questions about authorship, copyright, datasets, bias, cultural memory and the concentration of technological power.
But it also forces photography to confront a deeper problem.
For almost two centuries, photographs maintained a privileged relationship with reality: however manipulated they might be, something generally had to exist before the camera.
Generative AI has broken that assumption.
We have entered an era in which photographic realism no longer guarantees that an event, person or place ever existed.
For photographers, this is not merely a technological development.
It is an epistemological rupture.
Rusci's work attempts to remain inside that rupture rather than escaping from it.
Art as Research
This is perhaps the element that connects the apparently different areas of Vanessa Rusci's practice.
Photography, artificial intelligence, mythology, archetypes, education and curatorial work are not separate compartments.
They revolve around a recurring question:
How do images shape the way human beings understand reality?
The artist does not necessarily provide an answer.
Art becomes a research method.
Images become experiments.
Technology becomes something to interrogate rather than simply use.
Artist and Curator
Rusci’s artistic practice runs alongside her work as an independent curator.
In 2017, she became part of the NNC Gallery London Project, an independent curatorial platform created to connect emerging and mid-career artists with collectors, art professionals and contemporary art audiences beyond the most conventional circuits.
This dual role,artist and curator, inevitably shapes her perspective.
Curating means observing the development of other artists. Making art means accepting uncertainty within one’s own process. The two practices continuously inform and challenge each other.
Over the years, Rusci’s curatorial work has increasingly focused on long-term observation rather than rapid discovery: following artists over time, documenting their evolution, publishing and contextualising their work, and identifying sustained artistic research within the enormous quantity of images circulating through contemporary visual culture.
This approach has become even more relevant in the age of artificial intelligence.
Producing images has never been easier.
Developing an artistic practice remains difficult.
For Rusci, this distinction is fundamental: an image can be produced in seconds, but an artistic practice is built through research, continuity, experimentation, failure, critical thinking and time.
After the Prompt
The central question therefore moves beyond whether artificial intelligence should or should not be used in art.
That debate is already becoming obsolete.
The more interesting question is:
What happens after the prompt?
What does the artist contribute once generating an image becomes technically accessible to almost everyone?
Selection.
Research.
Experience.
Intention.
Context.
Material transformation.
Ethics.
Failure.
Revision.
And, above all, responsibility.
The tool can generate possibilities.
It cannot decide why an image needs to exist.
That remains the artist's problem.
NNC Gallery Curatorial Note
Vanessa Rusci's current research occupies an unstable territory between traditional photography and emerging forms of computational image-making.
Rather than attempting to resolve that instability, she uses it.
Her practice asks what remains specifically human when machines become extraordinarily capable of producing visual representations.
Perhaps the answer does not lie in defending an obsolete boundary between human and machine.
Perhaps it lies in intention.
In the capacity to choose.
To connect an image with history.
To transform technology into language.
To make an ancient archetype speak about the present.
To take something generated in a fraction of a second and subject it again to time, matter and the hand.
Photography is changing.
The image is changing.
The definition of authorship is changing.
Rusci's work begins precisely there:
not by asking how to protect photography from the future, but by asking what photography can become inside it.
Contact
CF
NNC GALLERY LONDON
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