In the Age of AI, What Is a Photograph Proving Now?

Cover photo: courtesy of Jaša Müller cover story for Paper Magazine featuring Ayo Edebiri In 1963, Melvin Sokolsky hung a model over the Seine in a plastic bubble. He had sketched it on a paper bag, had it built over ten days from plexiglass and aircraft aluminum, hinged at the top like a Fabergé egg, then suspended it from a crane on a cable barely thicker than a wire while Simone d'Aillencourt stood inside in couture, over the river [Sokolsky, Bubble on the Seine, Harper's Bazaar, 1963]. The morning they…