Curator’s Foreword, 2089

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When artificial intelligence has come to dominate almost every aspect of visual creation—and has replaced, in far too many fields, the human act of imagining and making—an urgent need arises: to look back. Not out of nostalgia, but out of historical responsibility.

This project, The Human Movement, emerges precisely from that impulse: to recover, preserve, and recontextualize the work of those photographers who, in the mid-21st century, still captured images in a world that was beginning to doubt the very notion of reality.

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Between approximately 2030 and 2060, across different parts of Europe, a dispersed yet essential generation of creators continued working with digital and analog photography without relying on generative systems. At a time when AI was beginning to infiltrate every layer of the creative process, these authors insisted on imagining, observing, capturing, and recording small fragments of the world without algorithmic mediation.

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Their resistance—whether conscious or intuitive—became an early form of cultural dissent.

As curator, here in the year 2089, I have undertaken a process of selection and editing that seeks a coherent aesthetic line, capable of weaving together the visions of all these photographers into a single visual narrative. Although their work differed greatly from one another, it is presented here as a unified whole: the Human Movement. A movement that never existed under that name in its own time, but which today, with historical distance, reveals a surprising continuity.

Each author is accompanied by a youth portrait photograph, taken when it was still possible to portray a person without synthetic mediation, as well as a brief biography recovered from archives, publications, and digital remnants of those decades.

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Alongside each image selected for this project, a short note, anecdote, or piece of context helps situate it within the cultural landscape of a period in which the act of photographing reality had already begun to dissolve.

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This project may be read as a work of visual archaeology, or as a romantic tribute, but it is also a reminder that there was a time—not so long ago—when seeing and photographing required thinking, imagining, being present, feeling, waiting, and choosing.

A time when images were not generated; photographs happened.

The Human Movement is the reconstruction of that legacy.

— Mario Rey, 2089