Garçon: synthetic portraiture
This project begins with a simple proposition: a man, a lens, a moment of stillness — except there is no lens, and there is no man. The portraits in this series exist in the space between photography and simulation, where presence becomes a kind of performance and the face becomes a site of negotiation. Working with Black Forest Labs’ Flux.2 Pro, I am not capturing light but directing it, not recording a sitter but constructing one. Flux.1 always felt like it was giving me images of men. Flux.2 gives me men in images. Yet the aim is not to deceive. These images behave like studio portraits because they respect the discipline of portraiture: clarity, restraint, attention, a belief in the quiet authority of looking. Garçon treats the synthetic model as a collaborator rather than an illusion, asking what it means to make a photograph that has no past or physicality, yet feels firmly rooted in observation.
Each portrait presents a figure shaped by aesthetic codes we recognise — the sharpness of fashion editorials, the poise of professional models, the neutrality that invites projection. They are young men who could populate any major city — or the pages of any major magazine, but here they stand alone, removed from branding, styling excess, or trend. Clothing is minimal and purposeful: shirts, T-shirts, jackets, pieces chosen not as fashion statements but as structural elements that guide posture and tone. Light defines them more than costume does. Expression defines them more than narrative does. The focus is on the face, the presence, the almost-human gravity that emerges when a synthetic figure is rendered with enough precision to feel observed rather than invented. These are not AI faces stitched together from clichés. This is not “AI portraiture.” This is portraiture — full stop.
Garçon is not a search for authenticity but a study of the conditions under which authenticity is assumed. These men are not real, but they hold themselves as if they were. They carry seriousness, hesitation, self-containment — human qualities shaped by no human life. The project asks what it means to recognise someone who does not exist, and why the act of looking can feel genuine even when the subject is a fiction. In that tension, a new kind of portraiture becomes possible: not documentation, not fantasy, but something that occupies the narrow, charged space between the two. These portraits inevitably raise a harder question: if a machine can produce images this lifelike, where does that leave the photographer, the studio, the model whose livelihood depends on being seen? The anxiety is real, but so is the opportunity — a chance for creative industries to evolve, to redefine their craft not by competing with AI, but by learning how to wield it with the same intention, discipline, and intelligence that shaped photography in the first place.
