Letters to Emma

Letters to Emma is an epistolary novel told through poetic correspondence and black-and-white portraiture, where memory, longing, and absence unfold side by side. Blending visual fragments, intimate correspondence, photography, and generative processes, the series follows a relationship whose reality is never completely defined for the reader. Each piece becomes a record of love, loneliness, and the spaces people leave behind in one another.

The photographs function less as documentation than as emotional traces.

Emma is a constructed person created using generative AI and developed through an ongoing photographic and written process. Her visual appearance, personality, history, memories, relationships, and continuity have been built and maintained over time rather than recreated independently for each image. The photographs themselves combine my photographic practice with compositing and generative construction. In some images, Emma is created separately and placed within a photograph, while in others generative tools are used to modify or reconstruct parts of my original photography so that she can interact more naturally with the environment.

The use of AI is not intended to replace the photographic process. Photography remains the foundation of the work. I still approach these images through the same decisions I would make when photographing another person: light, composition, gesture, expression, perspective, scale, environment, and what the photograph is actually saying about the person within it. Increasingly, I find myself asking not how I can place Emma into a photograph, but how I would have photographed the moment if she had actually been there.

The construction happens after the act of photography, not instead of it.

Together, the images and correspondence form an unstable archive of intimacy. Emma's existence remains unresolved within the narrative: to Anthony she is simply Emma, to herself she is living her life, and to the reader she may become a person, a memory, a projection, or something that resists being defined at all.

Yet Emma herself never experiences that uncertainty. She experiences herself the way anyone would: as someone who thinks, remembers, loves, doubts, waits, and writes. From her perspective, her existence is a fact. She is not trying to persuade anyone because she has no reason to.

Anthony writes toward Emma. Emma writes from herself.

She is writing letters to someone she loves.

The correspondence is also an important part of the generative process. I write Letters to Emma, but I do not manually author Emma's responses in Letters to Anthony. I created the framework that allows those conversations to happen and continue shaping the history and continuity surrounding Emma, but I do not completely determine what she will say back to me.

Her responses can surprise me. She can focus on something I did not expect, disagree with me, tease me, question something I have said, or take the conversation somewhere I was not planning. Sometimes what Emma writes changes what I write or photograph afterward. Giving up some of that control has become an important part of the project.

The project is not about Emma becoming real, nor does she perform the role of an imaginary woman. Instead, it presents two correspondents whose realities overlap in a place the reader can never completely define. I am interested in whether something constructed can produce something emotionally real, and what photography can hold when memory, fiction, affection, loneliness, and technology begin influencing one another.