Semanticization of Photography: Algorithmic Visibility, Query-Based Seeing, and the Perceptual Boundaries of Generated Images
Chinese Photography Journal, April 2026
This article proposes the concept of semanticization of photography to describe how photographic images are pre-labeled, embedded, and summarized within platform circulation and multimodal AI pipelines, and are subsequently invoked as semantic objects in processes of retrieval, recommendation, and generation. Adopting a method of conceptual analysis and case discussion, the article begins from Roland Barthes's account of image polysemy and anchorage in order to show how vision-language models redistribute visibility within databases through mechanisms of image-text alignment and ranking. It further examines how prompts and retrieval rewrite viewing into a form of query-based seeing centered on questioning, summarizing, and operational recall. On this basis, the article discusses how diffusion models reconfigure photography's relation among trace, time, and reality, arguing that documentary syntax and evidentiary force can no longer be automatically guaranteed by visual appearance alone. Finally, by turning to misrecognition, blind spots, haptic visuality, and punctum as embodied modes of experience, it emphasizes that image experience still contains perceptual residues that resist complete semanticization. The article concludes that photography has not ended, but that its mechanisms of production, circulation, and memory are shifting from optical witnessing toward computation and operational reuse, requiring the agency of both author and viewer to be reorganized within a new infrastructural condition.