Boris Eldagsen

Boris Eldagsen (born 1970) is a German photomedia artist and educator who spent decades exhibiting conventional photography before turning, in 2022, to generative image tools. He is best known for the most consequential art-prize stunt of the AI era.

The Sony refusal

In April 2023 his image Pseudomnesia: The Electrician — a haunting faux-1940s portrait generated with DALL-E 2 — won the creative category of the Sony World Photography Awards. Eldagsen then revealed the image’s origin and refused the prize, saying he had applied as a “cheeky monkey” to test whether competitions were prepared for AI and to force the photo world to confront the difference. The organizers’ handling of the affair drew far more criticism than the artist did.

Unlike protest entrants such as Miles Astray, Eldagsen’s point was not that AI images are lesser — he makes them. He coined the term “promptography” for the new medium and has argued for separate categories, new terminology, and honest labeling, while touring the lecture circuit as one of Europe’s most visible advocates for AI image-making as a legitimate art form with its own craft of prompting, curation, and post-production.