When you choose to take a picture, you choose a composition, you choose the light,
you choose the reality you want to represent. You really have to put yourself in the
picture, your emotion and what you think, and it's not just about not
presenting the reality because everybody sees the world in a different way.
When I was thinking about doing the story, I was more interested in the way
and in the place where Sophia was made. Nobody got access before, and after a week or
two and they granted me the access to the lab. When I see a story, I
try to to find an angle which is a bit more unknown, and the fact that nobody
ever saw the lab where Sophia was made and nobody was really thinking about it
was a bit more interesting for me than just seeing Sophia in a conference.
I wanted to take portraits of Sophia in a closed
environment where I could actually play with lights and had a little bit of time
to do a set up as if it was a studio, and I wanted to see the reaction
that Sophia has in in front of the camera. So I spent five days in the lab.
I followed the work from 6 o'clock in the morning until midnight. They are trying
to create a general artificial intelligence were all the artificial
intelligence in the world can exchange data and Sophia can learn and
grow at a much faster pace. While I was there, I discovered that they were doing
an experiment that was called loving AI and it was an experiment they
were doing in collaboration with the university. Sofia was doing guided
meditation with a patient, and at the beginning she was she was not really
engaging with the camera, and the last day, it was when the picture
that you see in the cover, and it was actually the moment when she realized I
had a camera, and she learned that she has to pose for a photography.
So she made this small smile and all the other things that made the picture.
At the beginning I could see that she was not reacting, so it was was a bit
more difficult to get the picture I wanted, but I think the way she learned
is to go and research on the web what kind of things
you're doing, so even the the expression she put at hand I'm sure it
was from some picture that she researched online. You could see that way
she reacted to the camera at the end that was a bit more human. I knew I was
taking picture of a robot,
I don't think Sofia is yet so advanced that she can really feel as a
human being but at one point
I need to be honest, and the last
picture I took, when she smiled at me it was kind of particular.
I needed the picture to to be as realistic as I could
and the 5DS R gives me all the details of the skin and everything, and if you
you see the picture in the magazine you can see that the skin feels real.
It looks real. The details in the file is really deep and a really crisp.
There are a couple of things about the picture that I really liked; one is the light and
the other one is the expression she has. It was the expression that I had in mind at
the beginning because she looked into the camera. I chose this really
small smile that reminds me a little bit of the Mona Lisa.
They gave me a really small room with no lights and with no space, so I had to adapt myself to
that but the the picture that went on the cover, I had that picture in mind.
The light that I wanted to use, the composition and editing and everything.
I had that kind of picture in mind before I went to Hong Kong, so I'm really
happy I could achieve that. When I took the picture and they saw it in the camera
I knew that the job was done.