Inspired by the golden age of Polaroid, Fujifilm, and beyond, The Imaflash Project is both a tribute to Japanese camera culture and a global exploration of spontaneity, imperfection, and the surreal, and influenced by the countless works of amateur photographers and names such as Nobuyoshi Araki, Daido Moriyama, Takashi Homma, Maripol, Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Robert Mapplethorpe and Lucas Samaras.
Imaflash embraces the unpredictability of instant photography—the blurred focus, washed-out tones, unfiltered moments, and bizarre compositions that make instant film an art form in itself. Every image is presented in its purest AI-generated form, with little to no post-processing, ensuring an organic, raw, and unpolished result, much like a freshly developed instant print.
The name of the project, “Imaflash,” it’s a play on time, technology, and perception:
Additionally, it also can be interpreted as:
Imaflash is the third project in a quadrilogy of AI photorealism projects, each exploring different aspects of image creation:
Just like instant film, Imaflash embraces variation and chance. Many images come in multiple versions, forming collections and albums that highlight the subtle (or drastic) shifts in AI’s generative process. Some images provoke, some amuse, and others leave you questioning their reality—but all are fragments of an AI-driven visual experiment.
One of the fundamental goals of Imaflash, just like Reflexorama and Boldenage, is to prioritize diversity in body representation. AI-generated imagery often struggles to depict plus-size bodies without reducing them to caricatures, exaggerations, or comical distortions. Imaflash aims to fill this gap by ensuring that plus-size individuals are portrayed naturally, realistically, and artistically, as they should be.
This topic has been analyzed and discussed in the Reflexorama and Boldenage websites, emphasizing the need for more accurate, respectful, and diverse body representation in AI-generated imagery. In Imaflash, body diversity is not an afterthought—it is an integral part of the aesthetic vision. The imperfections of instant photography align perfectly with embracing human variety rather than enforcing idealized standards.
To maintain the instant and documentary-like feel of the project, the album names in Imaflash follow a simple yet evocative system: they are titled using first names from diverse languages, both male and female. While the naming may not always seem directly connected to the images, it serves as a way to evoke the feeling of a cataloged archive or a reference system, much like collections of analog photography.
The names are also inspired by the idea of being attributed to fictional photographers or imagined realities in which these AI-generated instant photographs were “shot.” However:
This method of naming creates an open-ended storytelling aspect, allowing viewers to imagine the context, the unseen photographer, or the alternate world in which these images exist.
