From Allegory to Algorithm
The Royal College of Art Photography Exhibition
From Allegory to Algorithm, co-curated by Rut Blees Luxemburg and Harriet Min Zhang, presents the works of 18 alumni who studied at the renowned Photography Programme at the Royal College of Art, London. The exhibition brings together Yiding Chen, Xiao Han, Shin · Xinyu Hao, Wenqingao Reven Lei, Zhiyun Lei, Yushi Li, Zhihang Li, Zhuoheng Li, Lijuan Li, Yihan Pan, Shijing Shen, Luyao Shi, Bowei Yang, Ye Bing, Dashen Zhang, Zijian Zhou, Wanrong Zhu, and Yang Zou, inviting the audience to explore the multifaceted dimensions of image-making amid technological evolution.
Since photography's inception, the image has carried allegorical weight—constructing meanings through metaphor, symbol, and narrative, and creating interpretive space between the visible and invisible. Photographers, like allegorists, compose with light and shadow, allowing images to gesture toward meanings beyond their surfaces. Professor Olivier Richon proposes in his book Real Allegories, that photographic practice is located within a contemporary notion of allegory that considers images as script and rebus. His perspective invites us to recognise that photography has never simply "represented" reality; it has always been deeply involved in constructing and interpreting it, accumulating meaning through carefully chosen signs and symbols.
If Richon illuminates photography's allegorical dimensions, then Professor James Coupe, current Head of Photography at the Royal College of Art, brings this conversation into dialogue with algorithmic systems. Coupe's work engages with emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, and synthetic media, examining how these systems reshape our relationship with images. Rather than positioning algorithms as photography's adversaries, Coupe's work suggests they are new participants in an evolving image ecology. The anxieties around synthetic media and "falseness" usefully trouble our assumptions about photographic authenticity—reminding us that photography has always mediated rather than merely mirrored reality.
In this light, the algorithmic turn doesn't rupture photography's essence but continues its historical trajectory as a medium of construction and interpretation. From allegory to algorithm, from camera obscura to neural networks, photography remains a complex practice negotiating visibility, authorship, and representation.
Contemporary debates around photography often frame technological change as a threat to the authenticity of the image. At the RCA, photography is understood as a medium in flux, constantly evolving beyond fixed definitions and predetermined outcomes. The selected works for this exhibition represent a multitude of approaches and processes that coexist, overlap, and inform each other.
From Allegory to Algorithm offers an insight into the work of young practitioners who understand photography as an expansive practice, that is attuned to questions of change and visibility, narrative, memory and future imaginaries. The exhibition seeks to present the coexistence of allegorical approaches to photography and alternative ways of image-making which involve new technologies. A constellation of diverse visual practices serves as a reminder of the inherent adaptability of image-making media in the face of evolving techniques.
The MA Photography programme at the RCA comprises a unique, cross-disciplinary community of artists and writers working at the cutting edge of contemporary photographic practice and image-making. They understand photography to be an expansive and evolving practice, which includes the still and moving image, publishing, performance, installation, social practice, sound, synthetic media, text, and writing. Central to their approach is the practising, theorising, and perceiving of photography as a field unrestricted by the conventions of material, medium, format, discipline, and genre. Important to the Royal College of Art Photography programme's ethos is a commitment to process; to the unknown, indeterminate, speculative, and hybrid.
The artists in this exhibition come from diverse backgrounds and experiences that shape how they define the multifaceted meanings of photography. Their study in London shaped their practices to move with ease across boundaries—documentary and fiction, analogue and digital, personal memory and collective archive—exploring new possibilities at photography's edge. Some of the artists consider photography as a tool to construct fictional images that re-tell real-life experience while others reflect cultural unease through visual metaphors or emphasise the affective and sculptural nature of photography. Positions emerge where photography becomes an extension of the body and where algorithmic processes reveal shared narratives. From Allegory to Algorithm hopes to present photography as an intellectually engaged, visually stimulating, and ever evolving practice.
