Uncertain Archives is a series of appropriated and altered photographs sourced from the Library of Congress’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) collection—one of the most iconic archives of 20th-century American documentary photography. Originally created to generate public empathy and support for New Deal programs during the Great Depression, these images have long stood as visual records of historical “truth.” In this body of work, I restore and recontextualize these photographs through a combination of analog manipulation and AI-generated intervention. Into these once-familiar rural and domestic scenes, I introduce surreal and speculative elements—aliens, cryptids, futuristic machines, and other uncanny disruptions—that fracture their historical coherence.
These interventions are not merely visual intrusions, but deliberate re-authorings of the image. By embedding the implausible within the believable, I construct my own counter-narratives—rewriting the archive to reflect a layered reality where fiction, fantasy, and manipulated memory coalesce. This process calls into question not only the reliability of photographic representation but also the authority of archival truth. My edits destabilize the documentary impulse that defined the FSA’s mission, reconfiguring the image into a site of ambiguity, suspicion, and possibility.
This body of work emerges at a moment when political polarization, algorithmic misinformation, and AI-driven content creation have deeply eroded public trust in visual media. As manipulated images and deepfakes circulate with increasing ease, the photograph—once a bastion of evidence—has become a precarious and pliable medium. This series engages with that cultural unease, echoing postmodern strategies of détournement and appropriation while also engaging with contemporary anxieties around authorship, authenticity, and the archive.
Rather than preserving a fixed moment in time, I use these interventions to rupture linear historical narratives and assert new ones—ones that reflect not only the instability of memory and media but also the power of the image to shape, distort, and reinvent reality. Uncertain Archives ultimately invites the viewer to confront the seductive nature of images and the ways in which photography, far from offering clarity, can become a tool for myth-making, manipulation, and meaning-making in an increasingly uncertain world.
Written with ChatGPT
