In Edward Burtynsky and Alkan Avcıoğlu’s ‘Hypertopographics,’ Photography Meets A.I.

<img decoding="async" class="wp-image-1582159 size-full-width" src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/HeftGallery_Hypertopographics_InstallE.png?w=970" alt="A visitor walks through a gallery with three large-scale worksâtwo geological landscapes and one industrial compositionâmounted on the walls." width="970" height="691" data-caption='“Hypertopographics” by Edward Burtynsky and Alkan Avcıoğlu is on view at Heft Gallery through October 5. <span class=”media-credit”>Courtesy of Heft Gallery</span>’>

Critics once heralded the emergence of photography as the death of painting. Today, A.I. has sparked similar anxieties and dire warnings that it will ultimately replace human labor and inventiveness—and with them, the notion of “artistic genius.” Yet as with every technology before it, A.I. is, above all, a tool—a medium that can amplify and extend human creativity, offering instant access to and resonance with the vast heritage of data and knowledge that has shaped collective consciousness for centuries. Crucially, A.I. allows creators to easily draw from this immense reservoir of human expression to analyze, elaborate and even anticipate what might come next.

At Heft Gallery in New York’s Lower East Side, a groundbreaking exhibition of new works by world-renowned photographer Edward Burtynsky, in collaboration with generative A.I. artist Alkan Avcıoğlu, explores the creative and speculative potential at the intersection of traditional photography and emerging artificial intelligence tools. “Hypertopographics” examines how these technologies expand image-making and chart new visions of what’s to come, and prior to the show’s opening, Observer spoke with both artists about the capacity of both art and tech to anticipate humanity’s future.

Burtynsky, the Canadian photographer known for his large-scale images documenting the impact of human industry on the natural world, has consistently embraced technological shifts throughout his decades-long career. According to him, photography has never been solely about the tool—it is about how we see, interpret and respond to the world.

His new works portray, with haunting clarity, the scale and speed of urbanization and industrialization while fully embracing the possibilities A.I. offers to push digital imagery beyond the boundaries of human perception. The results are as dystopian as they are visionary: stark, mesmerizing images that seem to predict the future of our planet and the consequences of unchecked development, revealing how humanity’s relentless expansion has upended its fragile balance with nature.

Burtynsky sees A.I. not as a replacement for photography but as an extension of it. His collaboration with generative artist Alkan Avcıoğlu is a continuation of the pursuit he has always undertaken: making the unseen visible. For over 40 years, he has photographed the marks we leave on the planet—mines, quarries, refineries, farmland and cities—to reveal the scale and complexity of our interventions in the natural world. “‘Hypertopographics’ continues that investigation, but now I’m working in a hybrid space where the real and the synthetic merge,” he explains.

Rethinking medium in the age of A.I.

Burtynsky insists A.I. will never replace the human photographer. Instead, he sees it as a way to transform and expand the medium. “The nuances of emotional intelligence, political, social, environmental awareness and lived experience—these are things a machine can’t truly possess, at least not yet,” he reflects. He treats A.I. as an addition to the artist’s toolkit, not a substitute. “The challenge is to guide it toward a visual language that deepens our understanding of the world, not just adds to the noise.”

“A.I. mainly serves as a tool that expands an artist’s creative field rather than replacing the artist,” echoes Avcıoğlu, who describes himself as a polymath and self-identified outsider. His practice has long explored the possibilities of A.I. post-photography to grapple with digital overload, hyper-consumption of images and the alienation they produce. Yet he, too, emphasizes that no matter how sophisticated A.I. becomes, it will never replace the human eye—nor will it render other mediums obsolete. “Every new technology changes the language of art, but it never erases the human drive to see, interpret and intervene. What truly shifts is the relationship between author, medium and audience.”

For Burtynsky, A.I. is simply the latest step in a long chain of technological transformations. Analog photography offered a tactile, chemical relationship to the image, bound to film and the mechanics of the camera. Digital photography freed the medium from those constraints, unlocking new vantage points through drones, satellite imaging and 3D mapping—expanding perceptions of scale and place. “Conceptually, the digital revolution meant we could construct an image from many sources, times and perspectives,” he says. Tools like Photoshop introduced greater control, altering the very conditions of what could be photographed. Digital stitching allowed him to build murals and monumental works on a scale impossible in the analog era. He says his most significant contribution to this collaboration lies in transforming the generated image into a physical, large-format print that carries the weight and realism of scale—refined through decades of experimentation with new technologies.

By working with Avcıoğlu—who generates the images while Burtynsky acts as conceptual guide, curator and printmaker—the project merges photographic sensibility with A.I.’s capacity to weave together perspectives and scales. The results hover between the real and the imagined, grounded yet otherworldly, much like how memory or imagination operate.

Throughout his career, Burtynsky has approached photography as an anthropological and sociological tool. When the medium emerged in the mid-19th century, it was not immediately embraced as an art form but recognized primarily as a scientific and ideological instrument. In its immediacy, a photograph offers more than a record of a moment—it has the power to reveal more profound truths about the world, perception itself and the human condition.

In today’s fast-shifting, image-saturated, technologically mediated environment, Burtynsky believes these capacities are only expanding. Photography now holds even greater potential as a vehicle for witnessing and storytelling—but photographers share greater responsibility, especially as images become increasingly fluid and malleable. “Photography’s role is more crucial than ever—it’s both our collective memory and cultural conscience,” he argues. “In a world overwhelmed by images, the challenge is to make work that cuts through and slows people down enough to actually look and think.” For Burtynsky, this means creating photographs—or photographically informed works—that expose something essential about our relationship to the planet and one another. “As technology evolves, the core responsibility remains the same: to bear witness, question and illuminate.”

When asked if A.I. should be considered a new artistic medium, Avcıoğlu’s answer is both yes and no. Like digital technology, A.I. can, in some contexts, stand as a medium in its own right, while in others it functions as a tool within established practices. “Digital art became its own medium, yet films shot with digital cameras are still films,” he reflects. “Similarly, A.I. will create entirely new mediums and artistic languages, while also serving as a new tool and process within existing ones.”

Pushing the limits of the machine

Avcıoğlu’s process exists beyond the standard text-to-image prompt model. “My workflow is multilayered, and every piece goes through several stages of generation,” he says. The raw outputs often begin as abstract expressionist forms, with prompts at that stage bearing little resemblance to the final result. “These are mainly prompts to create a kind of digital painting with heavy texture,” he clarifies. From there, he runs the abstractions through multiple rounds of image-to-image generation, followed by tile-based upscaling and A.I. enhancement, gradually sculpting them into their final photographic form.

This method reflects a key point of connection with Burtynsky. “We both care deeply about the image carrying the subtle aesthetic presence of abstract painting,” Avcıoğlu explains. “The difference is that he makes his photographs and compositions approach abstraction, while I begin from abstract images and gradually turn them into photographs.”

For both artists, the real breakthrough lies in working with the machine’s limits while deliberately breaking them. “Brian Eno once said that so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart,” Avcıoğlu notes. “I definitely intend to break them with my experimental multi-step process. For me, staying within the boundaries is commercial work, while breaking them is artistic work.”

The emergence of hyperreality

In this context, we must consider the notion of “A.I. post-photography,” a term Alkan Avcıoğlu uses to describe his practice, drawing on a theoretical framework that first emerged in the 1980s in response to the crisis of representation in postmodern visual culture. “Photography in its strictest sense requires a lens and light striking film or a sensor. My work is photographic in scale and visual concerns, but it is not photography in that traditional sense.” For him, A.I. post-photography signals that departure.

The term captures an expanded reality beyond photography’s conventional role of crystallizing a present moment for the future. A.I. already enables connections across time—linking the present with past and future—not through fictional manipulation but through speculation grounded in the vast archive of human-generated content. In “Hypertopographics,” Burtynsky and Avcıoğlu merge scales and perspectives that neither the human eye nor traditional camera systems can achieve. This body of work extends Burtynsky’s long engagement with the “New Topographics,” probing contemporary conditions of overwhelming industrial scale, technological complexity and global interconnectedness. The result is an unsettling meditation on hyperreality, revealing an increasingly disorienting existential condition in which humanity’s global impact continually outpaces our ability to comprehend it.

“This capacity to synthesize realities allows us to imagine futures, to depict systems and scales that are otherwise invisible,” Burtynsky says. “It is a way of imaging the future, because it reflects the conditions of excess, acceleration and disorientation that define our time more truthfully than traditional forms,” Avcıoğlu adds. The works in the show confront viewers with the sheer scope of humanity’s accelerating imprint on the earth—an impact too vast for a single conventional photograph to capture. In a culture oversaturated with images and plagued by collapsing attention spans, this collaboration slows down perception.

The project grows directly from this philosophy and the contemporary condition of aesthetic perception shaped by sensory overload. “We deliberately begin by overwhelming the viewer, confronting them with images so dense and disorienting that they cannot be consumed in a glance,” he explains. “In that state of cognitive overload, familiar ways of seeing begin to collapse.” In getting lost in the details, viewers question their assumptions and open themselves to new ways of perceiving the scale and trajectory of humanity’s impact on the planet.

For Avcıoğlu, this leads naturally to “hyperreality,” a concept that runs through all his work. It is not only central to his visual practice but also shaped his recent feature-length documentary Post Truth, conceived entirely around the idea. “For me, hyperreality describes the collapse of the boundary between reality and its representation,” he explains. “As Baudrillard argued, in postmodern society, copies can become more real than the original. Similarly, synthetic A.I. images can be more real than the original representations of the world, because they can carry information that is not apparent in indexical reality.”

Photography has long served to democratize visual access through production, distribution and ownership. The rise of the internet and later social media accelerated this dramatically: today, anyone can capture and share a compelling image with an iPhone. In this context, a critical question emerges: What still makes a photograph special?

Intent and authorship in a post-digital world

“What makes a photograph unique today is less about the moment of capture and more about the intent, authorship and craft behind it,” Burtynsky answers. In an era where billions of images are made every day, the significance of a photograph lies in the depth of vision it represents—the thinking and seeing that shaped it. Uniqueness also comes from the object itself, he adds. “A large-format, meticulously crafted print, like the kind I’ve been making my whole career, still carries a presence and permanence that a digital file on a screen cannot match.”

The generative process of A.I. produces vast numbers of images, raising the question of what determines when a single one is “complete” or worthy of standing alone. For Avcıoğlu, there is no fixed formula. “It is always the set of ideas that an image carries,” he explains, echoing Burtynsky. “Everyone has cameras on their phone, but not everyone is Burtynsky. Everyone has a pencil, but not everyone is Shakespeare. Everyone can shoot a film, but not everyone is Hitchcock.” For him, focusing only on process or tools misses the point—what matters is becoming a refined storyteller who can give form to ideas with mastery.

All the works in “Hypertopographics” are presented as unique large-format, photographically informed prints, each paired with a tokenized digital artwork functioning as a Certificate of Authenticity. New technologies, they argue, are strengthening how authorship can be verified and originality preserved. “Authentication has always been important in photography, and digital technologies give us new ways to secure that,” Burtynsky notes. “By pairing each physical work with a tokenized digital counterpart that serves as a certificate, we’re creating a verifiable, permanent record of authorship. This can be especially valuable in an era when digital images can be easily copied or altered. It’s about maintaining trust—between artist, collector and audience—and ensuring the integrity of the work is preserved for generations.”

At the same time, working with A.I. creates a dialogue—a back-and-forth between human intelligence and what appears to be machine logic. This collaborative process raises new questions about authorship, both theoretically and legally, within the context of A.I.-generated images.

Yet Avcıoğlu resists the idea of calling it “machine logic,” arguing that what emerges from the system is essentially the collective unconscious of humanity. “With tools like A.I., the role of the creator becomes more collaborative and collective, moving away from the individualistic model,” he says. Looking at the arc of 20th-century art, he adds, there has already been a long process of stripping art away from the craft, mastery and technical skill that dominated for centuries. For him, what matters now is conceptual vision. “An ego-centric view of the creator has shaped Western art culture, and I believe A.I. will accelerate the shift away from that. Being a curator of your own work is always important, but for me, the real weight of art lies in the concepts and the ideas.”

In that sense, Avcıoğlu asserts that a “great image” is never absolute. “It is always relational to other images, and it is always about the story it tells in relation to them. Culture often reinvents or subverts itself when saturated, so the definition of a compelling image is always a moving target.” Quoting Susan Sontag—who wrote that the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own—Avcıoğlu adds, “Now, in an age where we are surrounded by cameras and A.I. images, even reality itself has become a tourist. We produce millions of images every day, but like a stranger to our world, we are no longer certain what reality even is. That is exactly why, more than ever, we need great storytellers.”

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