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Why Has the Getty Museum Acquired an A.I. Photograph?
The work by Matias Sauter Morera will be included in the museum's upcoming show, "The Queer Lens."
By Adam Schrader, January 10, 2025
Matias Sauter Morera. Cristian en el Amor de Calle (2024). Photo courtesy of Craig Krull Gallery
The Getty Museum in Los Angeles has acquired its first photograph generated with A.I.: an image by queer Costa Rican artist Matias Sauter Morera.
The acquisition of Sauter Morera’s Cristian en el Amor de Calle was announced on January 31 by the Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica and confirmed by the museum. It will be shown in an upcoming exhibition curated by Paul Martineau titled “The Queer Lens: A History of Photography.”
The image shows two young Latino men wearing blue leather jackets with gold embellishments in a rustic café or bar. Created by Sauter Morera, it evokes the aesthetics of queer history in 1970s Costa Rica when stories emerged of “pegamachos,” or cowboys from the Guanacaste Coast, who engaged in secret encounters with young gay men.
“Pegamachos still exist today, but less and less so. It’s a lifestyle that is clandestine, hidden and cloaked in anonymity,” Sauter Morera told me over email.
Matias Sauter Morera, Untitled (from the Barbie Town parties portrait series). Photo courtesy of Craig Krull Gallery
The artist uses various A.I. models and Photoshop to edit, refine, and enhance the images he creates. He initially considered using a straight photographic documentary approach, as he would in his normal practice as a photographer, but that would have proven difficult. The artist would have had to track down his subjects, potentially exposing them.
“A.I. provided a way also to achieve this without intruding on real lives or placing real Costa Rican faces that people of the community might recognize,” he said. “Since the pegamachos culture remains hidden, these A.I. images serve as a mimicry of photography, a fiction, and a medium through which I can imagine and construct an imagined parallel history.”
Sauter Morera said the use of A.I. allows him to pose hypotheses that he can then answer through the use of the technology, such as whether pegamachos would have expressed themselves more freely if Costa Rican society had been different at the time.
“Would cowboy culture have embraced latex?” he wondered. “These speculative questions are at the core of my work.”
The Getty Center in Los Angeles, California. Photo: David McNew / Getty Images.
Martineau, the museum’s curator of photography, suggested that the acquisition was shaped by more than its A.I. origins, noting that the museum has been seeking to expand its holdings of work by LGBTQ+ artists along themes of gender and sexuality and work by Latin American artists.
“Yes, this image is an example of the use of the latest technology in the exploration of the queer imaginary,” Martineau said by email. “A.I. is just one element that Sauter Morera incorporated into his complex working method.”
Hannah Sloan, a curator and art adviser who introduced the work of Sauter Morera to the Los Angeles market last year in an exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery, called it “noteworthy” that the Getty Museum would decide to acquire a photograph made using A.I., but, like Martineau, hoped the method won’t eclipse the meaning of the work.
“At the heart of Sauter Morera’s image… is the desire to reimagine a previously censored and unseen part of Costa Rica’s cultural past,” she said. “To let the technical aspects of this work overshadow the intention behind it would be a major disservice to the artist and the community the work is about.”
Matias Sauter Morera, El Pechuguitas. Photo courtesy of Craig Krull Gallery
Martineau, too, emphasized how technologies earlier than A.I. have been key to the evolution of photography. “This acquisition allowed us to dip our toes, so to speak, into the A.I.-generated universe,” he said.
“In this case, I was eager for the ‘Queer Lens’ project to span the invention of the medium in the early 19th century to the use of artificial intelligence in the second decade of the 21st century,” he added. “This image resonated with me because I imagine these teenagers were rejected by their families and left home to live independently.”
Martineau said the museum did not have any A.I.-related ethical concerns about the acquisition of Sauter Morera’s work because the artist uses multiple programs to generate his images with “hundreds of commands and choices that take months to perfect.”
“In the evolving history of photography, people bemoaned the death of the medium with the coming of the digital age,” said gallerist Craig Krull, who is hosting a solo show of Pegamachos next month. “A.I. is just the latest cause of growing pains in this evolution. We learned to make photographs without film, now we are learning to make photographs without a camera.”
Matias Sauter Morera, El Tope. Photo courtesy of Craig Krull Gallery
Though his image was acquired by a photography curator, Sauter Morera said he does not consider these works to be photographs.
“Although these images resemble photographs, they are not. And that is part of the concept,” he said. “I view A.I. as a creative medium in itself, distinct from photography.”
“The Queer Lens: A History of Photography” will be on view at the Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Dr, Los Angeles, California, June 17–September 28.