The daguerreotype was, in 1839, the first technique capable of fixing an image of the world. Its promise was objectivity: a trace of light on a silver plate, proof that something or someone had been there. This series uses contemporary generative models to produce daguerreotypes of people who never existed.
The gesture is paradoxical: a medium designed to capture the real becomes a device for representing what never took place. The faces, dated between 1856 and 1893, are credible enough to activate documentary reading, yet they refer to no family history, no lineage, no archive.
If, as Baudrillard wrote, the real has given way to its simulation, this work operates at the precise point where the image ceases to testify and begins to fabricate memory.