Timothy Comeau

Shakespeare Photograph (June 2025)

An image realized from an idea conceived in 2005

Back in 2005, I wrote a speculative passage imagining a future where "anatomically correct portraits of historical figures could be generated through computational modeling and probabilistic synthesis", blending art history, photography, and memory. The passage, quoted below, was not just science fiction but a reflection on how our photographs would survive into the future and how we would be remembered through them. At the time I imagined photographs resurrecting the dead through computers would be something achieved in the 2030s, and I was off by a decade.

She had one of the anatomically correct pictures of Shakespeare from the 2030s, when computer modeling had been matched to paintings and probability statistics to generate both 'true likenesses' and animated characters. This vintage Shakespeare print had all the vivacity of something taken by any time traveler with a digital camera. A scene in a meadow, and Shakespeare is smiling at the camera, strands of his hair floating in the breeze.

'It was my grandmother's' she said, rather proud of this first edition which had stood up well. The grandfather of this grandmother from whom she'd inherited this's had been a schoolboy himself in the 1990s. From an envelope she pulled out a photograph of that grandfather from two hundred years ago from and there I saw him, smiling at the camera while holding a bottle of beer.

The colours of this photo had faded to a light pastel, producing an entrancing effect, especially with the sheen of the paper's gloss. "That must be valuable", I said, and she let me hold it by the edges. "Not really," she replied, "I mean 20th century photos are a dime a dozen. But I've never thought of it as valuable. I have no idea what it's worth. It's always just been something I'd seen around at home, and it was something I wanted while I was here, to connect me to the past. Hard to believe I'm related to that guy eh?" "Do you have any videos of him?" "There's one when he's an old man, but he's just in the background. His name was Chris. He was a real member of the Generation X.

As I lay on her bed Shakespeare was smiling at me on an English summer's day of 1594, almost a smile of congratulations. Shakespeare was seemingly winking at me across six centuries. (2005-07-19)