AI Killed Images. Legacy Russell Knows How We Can Revive Them

Within the frame of a single image lives a lifetime of experience, emotion, and affect. For Legacy Russell, author of the new book Black Meme: A History of the Images That Make Us, speed and movement--virality--may be the best indicators into how an image speaks. Russell says that "asking questions about the truth of images, consent, and how we are complicit in the way they move--these are all things that are critical to this core driver of representation, and what the implications might be." Those implications, of course, are all around us and only growing in intensity with the spread of generative AI (during a crucial election year, no less). Already we are witnessing a "decay of imagery," she says, a degradation of what is accurate and authentic. To learn more, I phoned Russell, a New York City–based curator and author (her first book, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, was published in 2020), hoping to better grasp how images exist in our world today, assuming novel digital forms and sometimes strange meanings--or a lack thereof.