Paris AI sauce. The devastated Eiffel Tower, the broken Louvre pyramid: photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre used artificial intelligence to imagine a Paris in ruins in their photo book released at the beginning of November by Albin Michel.
With this Wembanyama format work, the two photographers have combined their art, their passion for the urbex and AI software to imagine a post-apocalyptic Paris weaned from its inhabitants.
52,000 images generated
For geeks, the duo, specialists in 4×5 room shots, used Midjourney to generate images from photos of places in Paris. It took 52,000 images to obtain (sometimes with great difficulty) the 80 images in the book. According to them, it would take around 650 generations for these images to become reality – or according to our trigonometric calculations around 20,000 years.
Throughout the pages, we discover well-known places like the Pompidou Center with its rusty pipes or the Evolution gallery returned to the animal stage, but also everyday places like a laundromat that deserves a good cleaning, a record store with striped decor or a bus depot which will no longer accommodate many people.
As for the genesis of the book, the photographers – accompanied by the writer Nathan Devers in the afterword – evoke the human fascination with ruins and the notion of the future. But maybe it's just a fantasy put into images for these two pioneers of the urbex.
The Ruins of Parisby Romain Meffre and Yves Marchand, with Nathan Devers, Albin Michel, 128 pages, €49.
