Portraiture Imagenomic (WORKING – CHOICE)

Portraiture Imagenomic: Toward a Theory of Generative Identity in the Digital Gaze

[Your Name/Institution] Date: April 14, 2026 portraiture imagenomic

The traditional portrait has long been defined by mimesis—the faithful reproduction of a subject’s likeness. However, the advent of generative AI, computational photography, and deepfake technologies has dismantled the portrait’s referential stability. This paper introduces the concept of portraiture imagenomic : a framework for analyzing how portrait images no longer merely represent but actively generate, mutate, and propagate identities across technical and social networks. Drawing on genomic metaphors (code, expression, replication, drift), we propose that the digital portrait operates as an “imagenome”—a mutable dataset subject to algorithmic editing, viral circulation, and synthetic recombination. Through case studies of AI-generated headshots, real-time face filters, and biometric portraiture, we argue that contemporary portraiture has shifted from depiction to progeneration (producing new visual lineages). The paper concludes by outlining ethical and aesthetic implications for authenticity, consent, and the notion of a singular self. enhanced by neural networks

Portraiture, Imagenomics, Generative AI, Digital Identity, Algorithmic Image, Computational Photography 1. Introduction: The Crisis of the Referent For centuries, Western portraiture operated under what John Berger called the “likeness contract”: the subject sat, the artist observed, and the resulting image stood as a trace of a unique individual. Photography intensified this contract, promising chemical indexicality. Yet today, a smartphone portrait is not a single exposure but a computational composite—stitched from multiple frames, enhanced by neural networks, and filtered through real-time facial landmark detection. When this image is then fed into a generative model (e.g., Stable Diffusion, Midjourney) to produce “variations,” we witness a fundamental rupture: the portrait no longer refers backward to a sitting body but forward to a family of possible images. Midjourney) to produce “variations