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Goethe Photograph (2005 – Ongoing)
In the summer of 2005 I read the first part of Nicholas Boyle's two part biography on Johann von Goethe*. It was noted that when Goethe died in 1832 the first photographs had been taken, but of course he never had a chance to sit for a portrait. Nevertheless, his features had been well documented in drawings and paintings, and I tried to imagine what such an early 19th Century photograph would have looked like.
In August 2005 I sat down to see if I could make something, imagining that photography had been invented 20 years earlier, and that the famous Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had sat for a portrait in 1828.
Since the rise of AI stable-diffusion generators like MidJourney and ChatGPT, I occasionaly revist this idea to see what they will come up with.
* Goethe The Poet and the Age, Nicholas Boyle, 1992
2005-08-14: Announced on my blog
2023-04-27: Created Instagram post