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 slightly uncanny. The mind searches for recognition before realizing the image doesn’t quite resolve.

The prints are produced as 15 × 15-inch silver gelatin photographs, placing a traditional photographic process 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 enormous databases of images to identify individuals. Chin’s experiment suggests a future where even a single photograph could generate an entire set of identifying portraits.

The work also touches on the question of bias. The dataset used to train the neural network came from historical mugshot archives spanning the 1930s through the 1970s. Like many historical records, it reflects the inequalities of the time. Chin discovered that the dataset included a disproportionately high number of African American subjects compared to the broader population.

Machine learning systems inherit the assumptions of the data used to build them.

Front and Profile invites viewers to consider how photography, artificial intelligence, and surveillance intersect today. As AI-generated images become more convincing, the line between documentation and fabrication grows less clear. What will count as evidence in the future? How will we recognize what is real?

Before turning fully to fine art photography, Chin worked for years as a computer graphics artist in film and television. He was an early employee at Pacific Data Images, later part of DreamWorks Animation, where he worked on films including Shrek, Madagascar, How to Train Your Dragon, and Kung Fu Panda.

With Front and Profile, those two worlds meet. Computer graphics, machine learning, and photography come together 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 might be used tomorrow.