Join us for a conversation around Seeing Against Seeing, an artists’ book created by Alexey Yurenev in collaboration with designer Teun van der Heijden and the Anti-Kriegs-Museum in Berlin. Yurenev will be joined in dialogue by van der Heijden and Fred Ritchin, author and dean emeritus of ICP.
Seeing Against Seeing is one of several outcomes of Silent Hero, a visual research project and historical investigation into Yurenev’s grandfather’s unspoken experience during World War II. Rooted in the documentary tradition, Yurenev’s practice confronts the challenge of visualizing what cannot be seen: absences in family and state archives, repressed memories, and events without witnesses. If photojournalism shows what could not be observed firsthand, one of generative AI’s more provocative capacities is to imagine what never happened, but could have. It is this speculative potential that draws Yurenev into collaboration with artificial intelligence.
At the heart of the book is a dialogue with Ernst Friedrich’s 1924 anti-war manifesto War Against War!, which used graphic photographs to dismantle war’s heroic image. Yurenev responds by employing a bespoke generative model trained on 35.000 portraits and landscapes of the WWII-era. The resulting synthetic images bear a striking resemblance to Friedrich’s photographs, echoing their visual grammar, yet they do not merely imitate historical evidence. Instead, they peel away the surface of photographic realism, exposing what lies beneath it—the flesh under the skin of the image.
Yurenev printed the generated images manually by using a polymer technique and showed the prints to five Red Army centenarian veterans in Brighton Beach, New York. These veterans are of the same generation as Yurenev’s grandfather, known as the “silent generation.” Their verbal reactions are interwoven with the images in the book.
The object is born out of an amalgam of a dissection of an eighties pocket edition of War Against War, Yurenev’s polymer prints and the response of the Red Army veterans printed in silver ink on translucent pages. Contained in a hand welded iron case that may rust over time, with scar-like sawing marks on its spine, Seeing Against Seeing is a meditation on vision itself: how we see, what remains unseen, and how seeing might be turned against itself.
Alexey Yurenev is a photographer and a visual researcher. His work has been exhibited at FOAM, Hangar, MOMus, Palazzo Poggi Museum and Rencontres d’Arles. Author of Seeing Against Seeing (Nooscope Press, 2025), he has been nominated for an Emmy Award and recognized by the Silurian Society. He teaches in the Columbia University MFA program and at the International Center of Photography.
Fred Ritchin is a writer, editor, educator, curator known for his pioneering work on the future of photography and digital media. He is Dean Emeritus of the School at the International Center of Photography, where he founded the Photojournalism and Documentary Photography Program in 1983. Ritchin was previously Professor of Photography & Imaging and Interactive Telecommunications at New York University (1991–2014), where he co-founded the Photography and Human Rights program with Susan Meiselas. Earlier, he served as picture editor of The New York Times Magazine.
He is the author of four influential books on imaging, including In Our Own Image (1990), After Photography (2009), Bending the Frame (2013), and The Synthetic Eye (2025), which examines photography in the age of artificial intelligence. Ritchin has also curated major exhibitions, developed early multimedia journalism projects, and co-founded initiatives such as PixelPress and Writing With Light to advance documentary practice and human rights-oriented visual storytelling.
Teun van der Heijden is a graphic designer and co-founder of Heijdens Karwei, a graphic design agency based in Amsterdam and New York. They are known for the design of award-winning photography books. Well-known titles from their work: Black Passport and Western Front [Stanley Greene], Rape of a Nation [Marcus Bleasdale], Interrogations and War Sand [Donald Weber], War Porn [Kristof Bangert], Carpe Fucking Diem [Elina Brotherus], REX [Zackary Canepari], An Autobiography of Miss Wish [Nina Berman], The Migrant [Anaïs López], 1078 Blue Skies [Anton Kusters], The Poverty Line [Chow and Lin], Goldcoast and The Quickening [Ying Ang], Centralia [Poulomi Basu], She Never Rode that Trishaw Again [Sim Chi Yin], SAKASA [Chloé Jafé] and recently Hard Times are Fighting Times [Alice Proujansky].
