Boris Eldagsen is a German photographer whose work moves between photography, conceptual art and AI-generated imagery, which he terms “promptography”.In April 2023 he declined the Sony World Photography Award after revealing that his winning image, The Electrician, had been generated with AI, sparking international debate about the boundary between photography and AI-generated images.
The Electrician is part of his series Pseudomnesia, black-and-white, vintage-styled images that he makes by prompting OpenAI's DALL-E 2. The series grew out of old photographs he found that had belonged to his father, a German soldier in the Second World War.He has described promptography as a form that “learnt its look from photography, but it's different at the same time”.At the 2023 award ceremony, after his proposals for public dialogue about the image went unanswered, he walked on stage to announce he was turning down the prize.
In 2011 Fondazione March invited his work SPAM the musical into the Internet Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, hosted by the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia.In 2025 The Electrician was shown again in the Berlin exhibition “RIVALS Photography vs. Promptography”, framed there as marking the transition to promptography as a new discipline in AI art.That year he also curated “PSYCHOPOMP! Follow the Unconscious” at the Inside Out Centre for the Arts in Johannesburg, inaugurating the Roger Ballen Centre for Photographic Arts with artists who use AI as a medium of introspection rather than image generation.Since May 2025 he has developed the series AI Art Rants, examining the differences between human-made and AI-generated art, and in January 2026 released the collection I Like Emotions and Emotions Like Me on objkt.com, which engages with the setting of Joseph Beuys's performance I Like America and America Likes Me without reenacting it.
