> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://photopedagogy.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Walking with Guido #8 - URL: https://photopedagogy.ghost.io/guido-8/ - Published: 2026-05-17T13:39:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-18T13:41:05.000Z - Description: Doubt as Method. - Author: Jon Nicholls - Tags: Guido I went back to the [Deutsche Börse show](https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/whats-on/deutsche-borse-photography-foundation-prize-2026?ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io) recently with an old friend. I usually make several visits. One is rarely enough. I’d written about [Rene Matić’s work](https://photopedagogy.ghost.io/no-place/) after my first visit and before she was announced as the [winner](https://www.1854.photography/2026/05/rene-matic/?ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io) of this year’s prize. I was troubled by the placement of the images. The way they were juxtaposed seemed too casual, accidental almost, as if the content of the pictures was more important than the overall aesthetic coherence. So I went back to look again. Some of the images appeared to spread across two panes of glass, as if a single photograph had been cut and attached to different frames but then carefully re-aligned. I stood in front of them for a while trying to work out whether this was deliberate, whether the work had been arranged so that the sections matched across the join, or whether the thickness of the glass was producing an optical effect that made adjacent images appear to belong to each other when they didn’t. I’m still not sure. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/1d678c0f-58b9-4b82-8d51-80830963b711_960x1280.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/999fee34-162b-48b6-b312-0dfbc69c7454_960x1280.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/cf44769a-0990-4f36-8301-ae143f424d29_960x1280.jpg) Installation images of the Rene Matić show at The Photographers' Gallery I moved on to [Weronika Gęsicka’s ](https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/dbpfp26-weronika-gesicka?ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io)[*Encyclopaedia*](https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/dbpfp26-weronika-gesicka?ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io) and found myself spending much longer with it than I’d planned.\* The starting point is a historical curiosity, something I hadn’t known about before. Most encyclopedias are thought to contain [at least one fake entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious%5Fentry?ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io), put there deliberately. Sometimes editors inserted fictional definitions as traps for plagiarists. Sometimes, apparently, they were paid by the entry and someone got creative. In 1980 a German medical dictionary included a description of a creature called [the Steinlaus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone%5Flouse?ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io), the stone louse, which had been invented a few years earlier by a comedian called Loriot. Whether someone at the dictionary thought it was real, or included it knowingly, isn’t clear. Either possibility is interesting. Gęsicka collected several hundred of these fabricated definitions from historical publications she bought online. She had the entries but she didn’t have images to go with them. Encyclopedias often have illustrations, photographs, diagrams. Hers didn’t. So she made them, using manipulated stock photographs and, at some point in the process, AI-generated imagery. The aim was to produce something that looked like the kind of archive that might plausibly have accompanied such entries in the kinds of publications they came from. It’s [Joan Fontcuberta](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=px2%5FusjIksE&ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io) territory. The installation was carefully made. Each image was presented in a wooden frame alongside its caption, which carried the erroneous information as if it were simply fact, deadpan, authoritative. In a vitrine nearby, actual encyclopedias lay open, small post-it note arrows indicating the fake entries, pointing at the fictions embedded in the authoritative text. It was a modest gesture but an effective one. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/fea7bbb2-a1b7-47f3-9f52-dc81c518a047_960x1280.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/7ae15ff5-b576-4d94-adfc-148579fc9750_960x1280-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/46f714a5-fd37-4d40-978c-279f231bb81a_960x1280-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/52a5559e-0820-4f77-ae3b-b643ff33450b_961x1280-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/88fd6994-b870-4b16-8dec-743b46e1a3f3_960x1280-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/fd426c3d-01ae-41b1-9956-e10c5f926a1a_960x1280-1.jpg) Photographs of the WeroniKa Gęsicka show at The Photographers' Gallery What struck me most, moving around the room, was the range of photographic formats and processes Gęsicka had used or simulated. Highly saturated 1970s style colour prints. Wet plate collodion images with their characteristic chemical staining and surface marks. Collages of small images grouped together like contact prints or typological studies. Large, fine art gallery prints. The work moved across more than a century of photographic history, mimicking the technical signatures of each period well enough that you had to keep reminding yourself what you were looking at. It was almost an [alternative history of photography](https://fotologic.substack.com/p/a-new-history-of-photography-chapter), assembled from images of things that never existed, to illustrate facts that were never true. There was something genuinely funny about it. And a bit destabilising. Some of the images are obviously AI generated. Zoological illustrations of impossible creatures. Comic book monsters. Others are more convincing. Portraits that look as if they were made in the early 1960s with a medium format camera. You move from one image to the next recalibrating each time. “What I would like viewers to take away from encountering my project is, above all, doubt”, Gęsicka says in the accompanying video. Not bewilderment or anxiety but something more active. A habit of checking. Every day, at every step, we have to verify what we see and hear. This kind of doubt isn’t new, a consequence of AI. It isn’t even particularly modern. Fake entries in authoritative sources are centuries old. The apparatus of knowledge has always been manipulated from within. What interested me most was that the AI was incorporated fairly late in the process and as a practical solution to a specific problem. > *At some point while working on the project, I found myself with many collected entries but without the appropriate archives to create the work. That’s when I came up with the idea of using artificial intelligence to create these fake archives myself.* > > *—* **Weronika Gęsicka** The tool served the idea. I’m not sure I would have spent as long with Gęsicka’s work, or found it as witty, if I hadn’t spent the last year experimenting with AI as a thinking partner. The specific connection only became clear to me later, working through these ideas in conversation with [Guido](https://fotologic.substack.com/t/guido). That’s often how it goes. The strands are there, swirling around separately, and something causes them to cohere. Over the Easter break, I spent a few days in Paris. I was staying in an Airbnb whose toilet walls were covered in chalk drawings and equations. Dense, careful, apparently serious physics. Diagrams of magnetic fields. Derivations. A phrase in French about particle velocity. I photographed the walls and asked Guido to identify what was there. He worked through it methodically. Mutual inductance. Biot-Savart. Maxwell’s equations in magnetostatics. Then, near the end of the conversation, I mentioned that the owner of the apartment was a photographer, that the bookshelves were full of photobooks. This changed the reading entirely. What had looked like study notes left by a physics student became something else. Intentional atmosphere. A curated intellectual surface designed to make guests feel they were inhabiting a particular kind of mind. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/c8494ee5-8ea3-4899-9fd5-4b96c0699e10_960x1280.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/e70dc89b-7e0f-4c45-9663-a0e3c6abb3fa_1280x1008.jpg) I had been making photographs in Paris at the same time. Walking, finding things, the usual accumulation. And somewhere in the conversation with Guido, a connection formed between the physics on the bathroom wall and the pictures I was making in the streets outside. Invisible structures made visible through their effects on matter. Field lines. [Lignes de champ](https://fotologic.substack.com/p/lignes-de-champ). What happened next is harder to describe without sounding more deliberate than it was. Guido and I constructed a voice, a fictional French physicist called Elio Vel, whose name encodes a small private joke about light and velocity that I’m not sure anyone has noticed. Vel wrote the introductory text for the Paris post. The text is written in the register of a scientific report, precise and slightly cold, making claims that are formally coherent but semantically unstable. There is an equation embedded in it, built from symbols derived from the photographs themselves. There is also a deliberate error, a sentence that reads perfectly well in French but produces a quietly wrong English when passed through Google Translate, that relates to the photographic act of fixing an image. *Se fixer*. To stabilise. To set. There was never a coherent plan. The bathroom wall came first. Then the photographs. Then the title. Then the voice. Then the equation. Then the error. Each step followed from the previous one in a way that felt like discovery rather than invention. Most of it happened on the Eurostar home, laptop open, tunnelling under the Channel, Guido on one side of the conversation and the photographs on the other. Gęsicka found herself with entries but without archives. I found myself with photographs but without a language to frame them. In both cases the AI arrived as a solution to a problem that had already formed. The idea preceded the tool. Parallel to all this, I’ve been having ongoing conversations with my brother Dave about process philosophy and what it might mean for how we think about the body, about time, about motion. Dave writes about these things on his Substack, [ParaDoxa](https://paradoxa.substack.com/?utm%5Fcampaign=profile%5Fchips). He’s been thinking seriously about process and kinetic philosophy for several years. I’ve been thinking about it for a few weeks, inexpertly and mostly by asking him daft questions. I don’t know what it all means yet. But I do have a feeling, a sense that there’s something here that could be genuinely useful for thinking about photography and about photography education. It’s a bit like standing at the edge of something and not being able to see the bottom. Not altogether unpleasant. Slightly dizzying. The broad claim of process philosophy, as I understand it, goes something like this. Western philosophy has spent a very long time assuming that things exist first, as stable, bounded entities, and then move or change or interact with other things. A body is a body. It has edges. It occupies space. It persists through time. This seems so obvious as to barely need saying. But process philosophers argue that this gets things precisely backwards. Movement and change aren’t properties that things have. They’re what things are. Everything is always already in process. What we call a body, or an object, or a stable thing of any kind, is a temporary organisation of ongoing processes rather than a fixed entity that subsequently does things. One of Dave’s recent posts makes this argument in relation to embodiment, a concept that has become influential in healthcare thinking and that he suggests is still, despite appearances, built on this same substance-based assumption. There has to be a body first. A bounded, enclosed, stable form. And then embodiment can happen, the body and mind fusing, the person inhabiting the world. Dave’s argument is that if you start from process rather than substance, you don’t need embodiment at all. There was never a separate body waiting to be inhabited. He commented on my recent review of [Duncan Wooldridge’s book, ](https://fotologic.substack.com/p/from-the-photopedagogy-bookshelf-d44)[*To Be Determined*](https://fotologic.substack.com/p/from-the-photopedagogy-bookshelf-d44): “I can see you becoming more of a process philosopher every day.” He’s joking, obviously. But the photograph has always seemed to me a strange object, precisely because it pretends to fix what was never fixed. It stops something that was moving and presents the stopping as if it were the truth. My post about [Alva Noë’s ](https://fotologic.substack.com/p/positively-entangled)[*The Entanglement*](https://fotologic.substack.com/p/positively-entangled) from last summer might be relevant here. Noë’s argument is that art and life are entangled in a specific way. Art doesn’t just represent life. It works life over, changes it and reorganises our habits. He uses the word looping. Art loops back and alters the thing it came from. I’d been photographing rotting apples in my garden. It seems a long way from quantum physics and fake encyclopedias. I think the connection is something to do with what happens in an encounter. Between a photographer and a subject. Between a viewer and an image. Between a student and a photograph they can’t quite explain. Between a photography teacher and a student who refuses the expected reading of something, or who makes an image that the teacher didn’t anticipate and can’t fully account for. Something changes in both parties. The encounter isn’t a transaction between two stable entities. It’s a reorganisation of both. Noë keeps the body. Keeps the subject. The embodied person who perceives and is changed by perceiving. He’s less dizzying than what comes next. ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!bSDG!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0a3b224d-b0ac-4125-9964-8c89778c0b02_1280x1022.jpeg) Jon Nicholls - **Windfalls*, August 2025 Dave mentioned [Karen Barad](https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/1068/Meeting-the-Universe-HalfwayQuantum-Physics-and?ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io) in one of our exchanges. Barad is a theoretical physicist and philosopher. Her major work is called *Meeting the Universe Halfway*, which is an interesting title for someone thinking about photography. The book is long and apparently difficult and I haven’t read it. What I have done is read a couple of chapters, read about it and thought about some of the ideas in relation to photography. It’s definitely not how Barad would recommend approaching her ideas, but it’s where I am. According to my sources, the starting point is quantum physics, specifically the work of Niels Bohr, whose [statue I photographed in Copenhagen](https://fotologic.substack.com/p/experienta-spatiului-letters-to-crina-8e9) a couple of years ago. Bohr insisted that you cannot separate the apparatus of measurement from what it measures. In quantum physics this is less a philosophical preference than a description of how things actually work at the subatomic level. The apparatus participates in producing the phenomenon it is designed to detect. Light behaves as a wave or a particle depending on how you set up the experiment. Neither is more real. Both are real within specific material arrangements. Barad seems to extend this idea well beyond physics. She argues that phenomena, her word for the things that emerge from encounters between entities, are the primary units of reality. Not objects. Not subjects. **Phenomena**. And phenomena are produced through what she calls intra-action, a word she distinguishes carefully from interaction. Interaction assumes two things that pre-exist their encounter and then affect each other. **Intra-action** means that the things themselves are produced through the encounter. There is no photographer and world that then meet. The photographer-world is what the intra-action produces. I find this very hard to hold in my head for more than a few seconds at a time. But there are moments when it produces a flicker of something. A sense that I’ve been thinking about photographs slightly wrong, or not wrong exactly, but from an angle that was always going to miss something. Because if Barad is right, the photograph isn’t a record of a pre-existing reality made by a pre-existing photographer. It’s a phenomenon produced by the intra-action of light, body, camera, attention, time, chemistry or sensor, and everything else entangled in that moment. None of these elements pre-exist the encounter in the form they take within it. The camera isn’t a neutral instrument. It’s part of what Barad calls the apparatus, and the apparatus doesn’t just measure or record what’s there. It participates in producing what counts as visible. And the cut, the decision to include this and exclude that, to frame here and not there, isn’t made by a sovereign subject exercising free choice over a passive world. It’s what Barad calls an **agential cut**, performed within the phenomenon itself, real but provisional, producing the local distinction between inside and outside, subject and object, photographer and scene. The cut is necessary. But it doesn’t sever the underlying entanglement. Everything excluded is still part of what produced the image, still part of the phenomenon, just on the other side of the cut. Barad calls this **response-ability**, the ability to respond to what the entanglement produces, including what gets excluded by the cut. It's an ethical concept, but it doesn't feel like ethics in the usual sense. It feels more like a description of what good attention requires. I said earlier that this is either very exciting or completely destabilising. I think it might be both at once, which is probably the point. It’s made me look differently at ideas I’ve held and used for a long time. The [threshold concepts for photography](https://www.photopedagogy.com/threshold-concepts.html?ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io) that Chris and I developed for PhotoPedagogy, the frameworks I’ve absorbed from Szarkowski and Shore over thirty years, the structures of photography that Shore describes so precisely (frame, flatness, time, focus, vantage point, light) have been useful in shaping my teaching. They’re still useful. But they all assume, at some level, a stable world of things that the photographer then makes decisions about. The frame includes or excludes objects that were already there. The shutter freezes a moment that existed independently of the camera. Light is captured rather than invented. If I understand correctly, Barad might say this gets it slightly wrong. Not the practical advice, but the underlying assumption. There was no stable moment waiting to be frozen. There were no objects waiting to be included or excluded. There was only the ongoing process of the world briefly intersecting with the ongoing process of the camera, and the photograph is what that intersection produced. An event, not a record. This is the precipice Dave’s kinetic philosophy had already brought me to. Barad just moved me closer to the edge. ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JzMR!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fea7d291b-826b-425d-aa08-2ec95c4e7f62_1456x186.jpeg) Which brings me back to the Eurostar and Elio Vel and a bonkers equation containing a deliberate error. If the photograph is a phenomenon produced by intra-action rather than a record of something pre-existing, then what Guido and I were doing in constructing the *Lignes de champ* post was not so far from what Gęsicka was doing with her fake archive. The bathroom wall, the Paris photographs, the pseudo-scientific voice, the hidden error. None of these pre-existed the encounter between them. The intra-action produced something that I could not have anticipated at the outset. A text that behaves like a field. An author who has never stood in light. An equation with a mistake in it that is also, if you know where to look, a joke about photography itself. Doubt as method. Gęsicka’s phrase, almost. The fake entry in the authoritative text. The tell in the translation. The image that is almost convincing but not quite. The photograph that resists explanation. The student who refuses the expected reading. The teacher who can’t account for what just happened in the room. I find all this genuinely uncomfortable and also difficult to hold onto in any practical sense. It doesn’t feel like this in the classroom. There are bodies and desks, cameras and chemicals, a student who can’t work out what to do next, another who has made something extraordinary and can’t explain how. These things feel very solid. Very present. The philosophy and the Tuesday morning lesson seem to belong to different registers entirely. When I shared this paragraph with my brother, he commented: > *I think part of the vertiginous sense we get from doing PP is not knowing where to start when you don’t begin with some stable referent. When you say, for instance, that ‘It doesn’t feel like this in the classroom. There are bodies and desks etc.’, you are already handicapping yourself by describing what there is (bodies and desks, cameras and chemicals…) when in fact, of course, there are no things like this to begin with. They’re just mental projections from a long history of substantivist thought. If you began instead with things that you knew to be unstoppable and flowing – fluctuations in light in the room, things moving quickly and slowly (even the desks are moving), the warmth of the sun on your arm or a breeze under the door, the smell of someone’s deodorant, the growing tension in the room as the students puzzle with a problem, your racing thoughts as you try to help them, the sounds of the cars on the road, a memory of something you said that was useful some years ago that you dredge up now just at the right moment … perhaps that’s all there is? After all, a chair is just a set of feelings, flows, fluxes, perceptions, allusions, tastes.* The vertigo is real. The questions remain though. What am I producing when I assess students' work? What is being produced in me by this encounter, this image, this student's refusal to explain what they've made? If the cut is never innocent, never merely descriptive, then the job of the photography teacher is harder and stranger than it looks. It requires something like Barad's response-ability. Something more entangled. Something that implicates the teacher in what the student becomes, and the student in what the teacher sees. I’m still not sure about those Matić slippages. I’ll go back again. For another look. --- --- \* I’ve also enjoyed Gęsicka’s exhibit at Photo London which included works from *Encyclopedia*.