Photography
From myth to reality: aging
Discover how artificial intelligence reveals, with astonishing accuracy, the passage of time on a young body. Between illusions of eternal youth, myths that refuse to age, and human reality, this text explores our relationship with aging and how to accept it.
It's hard to imagine that an elderly person was once young. Her weakened body, her features marked by time, seem to belong to another story, to another being. Yet, the photographs she keeps bear witness to an irrefutable truth: one day, she was radiant, lighthearted, possessed of the audacious beauty of youth. Between those images and her present body, the passage of time has wrought its inexorable metamorphosis.
The opposite, however, remains unfathomable territory for the human mind. We observe the splendor of a young body without being able to accurately project what it will become. How can we imagine that this smooth skin will wrinkle, that these taut muscles will lose their strength, that this radiant face will grow heavy with the passage of time? Youth, in its triumphant illusion, seems eternal. It is experienced as a stable state, as if time were still hesitating to take hold.
Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing this perception. Starting with a young, perfect body, it constructs a visual hypothesis of the future: delicate wrinkles, gradual sagging, graying hair, changes in posture. AI doesn't just age the face; it reveals the profound logic of aging, its biological mechanics inscribed in every cell. It makes visible what the eye refuses to imagine: our own mortality.
This projection acts like an inverted, almost mythological mirror. Why did Achilles and Adonis never age? Because myths reject physical decay, preferring the frozen eternity of heroes. We, on the other hand, cannot escape the body's natural cycle. By revealing this possible future, AI confronts us with a truth that culture and heroic narratives have long obscured: beauty is a moment, not a permanence.
For each of us, the only thing left to do is fight and accept this aging, illuminating the invisible continuity between radiant youth and the body marked by time.
.jpg)
For each of us, then, all that remains is to learn to fight and to accept, not as two contradictory actions, but as two movements of the same wisdom. To fight, to preserve what can be preserved: a smile, dignity, vitality, the inner drive that is not dependent on age. To accept, so as not to lose ourselves in the illusion of eternal youth and to recognize that the body, even marked by time, remains the faithful witness of our passage on earth.
Between these two poles, AI invites us to contemplate the invisible continuity that connects vibrant youth to the body transformed by time. They are two sides of the same story. Accepting aging ultimately means accepting to understand oneself throughout the entirety of one's existence, from the first light to the gentler shadows of maturity.