A Quiet Unease

This series examines the emotional and psychological landscape of contemporary life through AI-generated portraits of individuals marked by quiet anxiety and unease. Inspired by Robert Adams’ Our Lives and Our Children, which documented the subtle distress of communities living in proximity to a nuclear enrichment plant during the 1980s cold war period, this project explores the diffuse, ambient (epistemological) worries that define our present era: economic instability, environmental degradation, social fragmentation, and the rapidly evolving presence of artificial intelligence.

Compounding these anxieties is the role of contemporary news media, which frequently manipulates public perception by amplifying narratives of crime and danger, often untethered from empirical evidence. In this environment, fear becomes a manufactured and mediated condition—one that circulates in headlines, screens, and algorithms, shaping both public consciousness and private emotion.

The series replaces documentary objectivity with synthetic construction, foregrounding a mediated realism that reflects the post-truth conditions of our time.  Through artificial image-making, the project stages a speculative archive of worry, interrogating how fear has shifted from specific geopolitical threats to an ambient, networked anxiety—a silent epidemic etched into everyday expressions.

Through the staging of portraits in familiar domestic and suburban settings, the work foregrounds the tension between surface normalcy and internal disquiet, offering a critical reflection on the unseen burdens carried by individuals in late-capitalist society. The use of AI as both medium and subject further complicates questions of authorship, authenticity, and control—intensifying the very unease it seeks to represent.

2025 Pingyao International Photography Festival, Pingyao, Shanxi Provice, People’s Republic of China