From the Editor

Welcome to Afterimage’s December 2025 issue (Volume 51, no. 4).We begin with Jackson Davidow and Lee Wormald’s look at the photography program Jack Lueders-Booth facilitated at Massachusetts Correctional Institution–Framingham from 1978 to 1985—and the archive that came of it. Although Lueders-Booth enjoyed a unique subject position, the project was one of co-creation with the incarcerated women photographers. The Polaroids that were produced were augmented by oral history interviews, conducted by Lueders-Booth, that provide a “sonic immediacy,” as Davidow and Wormald write, and function as a “polyvocal archive that runs counter to carceral archives,” thus positioning the project as one that challenges institutional narratives.Our second essay explores middle age and the challenges of navigating illness and the aging female body—particularly as an artist. Rotem Rozental engages with the work of several artists, notably photographer Elinor Carucci and her 2019 photobook Midlife. Looking to the future, Rozental’s inquiry hits on Gen Xers as being “an anchor for subsequent generations…as instigators of a possible transmutation of the mold that has shaped the fate of women, specifically, and other marginalized gender-based groups in arts and culture.”This issue’s first research article is a translation from Portuguese, by Pedro Vaz, of an article by Elisa Noronha Nascimento. This study focuses on the ways museums can and do reinvent themselves by musealizing contemporary art. The article uses the lens of three perspectives that highlight how museums relate to their own myriad contexts and elucidates how the growth in contemporary art museums has been accompanied by “social transformations that were not always positive and, consequently, by political and economic reforms aimed at restoring and promoting social trust, cooperation, and community well-being,” ultimately revealing “much more about the known and close present than about the strange and distant past.”Andréia Machado Oliveira contends with French philosopher Gilbert Simondon’s Theory of the Image by conceptualizing the bio-techno image and exploring the continuity bridging biology and technology. Oliveira examines the image “from three vantage points: its genesis, its cyclical nature, and the bio-techno image as a relational conception” and uses a transdisciplinary approach to understanding the technological image in contemporary contexts, encompassing art, philosophy, technology, and media studies.In our last article, Brittany Myburgh revisits the work of Thomas Wilfred, the early twentieth-century visual artist, designer, musician, and inventor. Wilfred created lumia, a form of light art that he posited was “a ‘real-time’ and kinetic extension of performative abstract painting, or lux pinxit.” Myburgh details the challenges Wilfred faced in positioning lumia as an autonomous form of art “while contending with its intermedial origins.” Ultimately, Myburgh concludes, lumia “represents a site of technological and artistic convergence, anticipating later developments in light art, expanded cinema, and immersive digital installations.”A rich reviews section begins with coverage of two recent exhibitions. Wendy Grossman guides readers through Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity at the Jewish Museum in New York City. Best known as a painter, Shahn often relied on photographs as source material and Grossman highlights how those intriguing connections were presented in this show. It is a crucial history as Shahn’s “compelling use of camera images across a striking array of media [remind] us just how profoundly photography matters.” Jaclyn Meloche reviews the Toledo Museum of Art’s Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms. This multimedia group show investigated the aesthetics, materiality, and mechanics of digital and computational art and expanded on how the various contributions “staged AI technologies in modern and contemporary art as agents working in collaboration with the human body.”We then turn toward three books addressing new technologies. First, Holly Willis reviews DeepAesthetics: Computational Experience in a Time of Machine Learning by Anna Munster, which tackles machine learning and the language of computation in terms of new media practices and technologies. As Willis writes, these fields “have many of us in media studies scratching our heads” and predicts the text will be challenging for scholars unfamiliar with machine learning, but notes that it also fulfills “a pedagogical purpose while positing a creative, productive, and even necessary perspective that is often thrilling.” In our next review, Santasil Mallik notes that picture editor, curator, and educator Fred Ritchin draws on his years of experience in his new release, The Synthetic Eye: Photography Transformed in the Age of AI. While Ritchin offers a panoply of references and case studies as well as compelling anecdotes to make connections between “epistemic anxieties around ‘synthetic’ or AI-generated photorealistic images to half a century of changing image-making technologies,” Mallik questions whether Ritchin has successfully established a theoretical position. Our last review digs deep into another angle of inquiry into current thinking about AI. Reviewer Tate Shaw notes that the images in Charlie Engman’s photobook Cursed (2024), made with GenAI image generators, force contemplation. But, Shaw writes, “Engman proposes that our disgust [at some elements of AI that may be unsavory] is telling. He uses the book as a familiar, even neutral ground to Trojan horse the difficulty within.” * * *We continue to welcome submissions throughout the year. You can visit “Submit” on our website for details or inquire directly about guidelines.We at Afterimage wish you a warm and healing winter.Take good care,