Three Popes and the End of Indexicality
Collage by the author. Images used under fair use. © Respective copyright holders.
These three images serve as visual markers of a contextual shift that defines the ground on which I situate my artistic research within contemporary photography. They frame artistic inquiry against the backdrop of photography’s widespread popular use and circulation – ranging from smartphone snapshots to press photography and advertising. This everyday visual landscape constitutes the baseline from which critical artistic practice can begin: a field shaped by attention, repetition, and algorithmic distribution, and one that demands reflection, resistance, or reconfiguration.
The first two images are from the public announcements of two papal elections: Pope Benedict in 2005 and Pope Francis in 2013. In the span of just eight years, the crowd’s mode of seeing had visibly shifted – people were no longer simply present, but viewing the moment through the mediated filter of their cameras and phones. A decade later, the third image appears: Pope Francis in a white, Balenciaga-style puffer jacket. I deliberately refrain from writing seemingly shows, because what we are presented with is a photographic image. It looks exactly like one – the lighting is plausible, the resolution convincing, and there are no immediate signs of manipulation or glitch.
The image was uploaded by a now-deleted user to the Midjourney subreddit and briefly went viral – primarily because it was entertaining, but also as a reflection on the evolving nature of AI-generated imagery. Viewers instinctively recognized it as fabricated; of course, Pope Francis would not wear such a jacket. But more significant than the fabrication itself is what the image reveals about our current understanding of reality. I refer to it as a photographic image precisely because it is not a photograph in the traditional, lens-based sense. It belongs to a higher order of photography: an image that is perceived as a photograph, regardless of its indexical basis. It performs as a recording of a moment in space and time - and it is hyperreal. In a sense, this is what photography has always been perceived to do: to stabilize and authenticate moments through visual plausibility.
This moment marks a shift I will return to throughout the following pages: a transition in which the image becomes reality, and the real becomes a performance for the photographic apparatus Flusser, 2000. When we look at the Balenciaga Pope, we know the image is real. It exists. But we no longer know anything about the physical world it supposedly depicts. We lose touch with the material grounding that has long been central to photography. Reality dissolves into a mediated blur, overwhelmed by a growing stream of entertaining images designed to grasp fleeting moments of our attention.
Flusser, V. (2000). Towards a philosophy of photography. Reaktion Books.