About

In Front and Profile, photographer Adam Chin takes a familiar image—the archival mugshot—and pushes it into unfamiliar territory.

Using a neural network he modified himself, Chin feeds historical booking photographs into the system. From a single image, the machine predicts an alternate view of the same person. A frontal mugshot becomes a profile. A profile becomes a frontal portrait.

Each work pairs the original photograph with its computer-generated counterpart. The resulting diptychs feel both photographic and uncanny. The viewer searches for recognition before realizing the image never fully resolves.

Printed as 15 × 15-inch silver gelatin photographs, the work places one of photography's most traditional processes in conversation with artificial intelligence.

The series asks a simple but unsettling question: what happens when one image contains enough information to produce another?

Facial recognition systems already rely on vast databases of images to identify individuals. Chin's experiment suggests a future in which a single photograph may be capable of generating an entire set of identifying portraits.

The work also confronts the question of bias. The neural network was trained using historical mugshot archives spanning the 1930s through the 1970s. Like many historical records, the dataset reflects the inequalities of its time. Chin discovered that it contained a disproportionately high number of African American subjects, revealing how machine learning systems inevitably inherit the assumptions embedded within their source material.

As AI-generated imagery becomes increasingly convincing, the boundary between documentation and fabrication grows less certain. What will count as evidence in the future? How will we recognize what is real?

Before turning fully to fine art photography, Chin spent years as a computer graphics artist in film and television. With Front and Profile, computer graphics, machine learning, and photography converge to examine the future of images and the systems that interpret them.

The result is a body of work that looks back through historical police archives while quietly asking how those images may be used tomorrow.

About the Artist

Adam Chin is a photographer and former computer graphics artist whose work explores the intersection of photography, machine learning, and perception. He was an early employee at Pacific Data Images, later part of DreamWorks Animation, contributing to films including Shrek, Madagascar, How to Train Your Dragon, and Kung Fu Panda.

His recent work has been featured by the Los Angeles Center of Photography.

View his participation in LACP’s Expand and Contract: AI and Alternative Processes →