Event
Location: n-ost media hub, Erkelenzdamm 59-61, Portal 1b, 10999 Berlin
In today's post-truth landscape, the ultimate weapon isn't the fake image, but the doubt it casts on everything real. This threatens trust, fuels disinformation, and weakens photography’s role as evidence. But it also gives us a chance to reassert the importance of context, verification, and documentary photography that stays rooted in truth. We will debate whether photography’s role is to simply deliver distorted realities or to build a new bridge of trust between the author and the audience.
Join our discussion with
Natalia Kepesz - Polish documentary photographer based in Berlin represented by Laif photoagency. With a background in Cultural Studies, Art History, and Photography, she explores themes of memory, trauma, and the margins of society, with a particular focus on Eastern Europe and the long effects of political instability. In 2021, she received 3rd Prize in the World Press Photo contest for her series Niewybuch, documenting military summer camps for youth in Poland.
Gesine Born - science communicator based in Germany and the founder of Bilderinstitut, an organisation dedicated to making science visible. Her work engages with questions of visibility and recognition in science, and she focuses on bringing overlooked stories into public view. Her project Missing Pictures highlights the lives of female scientists whose contributions were neglected during their lifetimes.
Selene Magnolia Gatti - Italian documentary photographer and visual journalist based in Berlin. Her practice centers on environmental justice, migration, human rights, and identity, combining visual storytelling with a strong ethical commitment. Her work is published internationally and is dedicated to amplifying marginalized voices while exposing the human dimensions of global crises. She is represented by Panos Pictures and part of We Animals and Wildlight.
Moderated by Ramin Mazur (n-ost)
Background and context
This talk explores the fragile role of documentary photography and photojournalism at a time when synthetic images created by artificial intelligence blur the line between evidence and fiction. Digital manipulation and AI-generated photographs have created a world where the very act of seeing is no longer proof. The event focuses on how this shift challenges the profession and what it means for our collective trust in visual storytelling.
The challenge goes beyond the existence of fake photographs, or generated images. It is the erosion of certainty itself: the public no longer knows what to believe, and this uncertainty becomes fertile ground for manipulation, propaganda, and disconnection. Thus even the most rigorous documentary work risks being dismissed as “just another image.” This undermines journalism’s ability to inform and weakens photography’s historical function as witness and evidence. At the same time, the ease of producing synthetic images raises difficult ethical, artistic, and professional questions about authorship, originality, and the boundaries between fiction and reality.
How can photojournalists re-establish trust when doubt has become the default response? What role do context, verification, and transparency play in restoring photography’s credibility? Can synthetic photographs ever have a place in documentary practices, or do they represent a fundamental break with truth-based work? And ultimately, is photography today condemned to deliver distorted fragments of reality, or can it open new bridges of trust between authors and audiences?
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