Lucas de Monchy
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©2025 Lucas de Monchy
As part of the concluding history thesis course, I aimed to investigate how creative AI systems and architectural photography intersect, with a focus on the contributions of Julius Shulman (world’s most influential architecture photographer?) and to assess the potential impact of this technology on the field’s future.
Using Midjourney (a generative program), I ran two experiments: first, testing image-to-text descriptions of Shulman’s photos; second, generating new images from carefully written prompts. The results show AI is impressive at ideation and iteration, but unreliable as a faithful describer without human guidance—raising both opportunities and ethical questions for the field. The study looks at how creative AI can engage with Shulman’s modernist photographs and what that means for authorship, accuracy, and the future of architectural imagery.