Image Manipulation from Darkroom to AI
Based on an episode with Juliana Castro Varón 🇨🇴
Welcome to Latinx in Power, a podcast aiming to help to demystify tech, the way we do that is by interviewing Latinx leaders all over the world to hear their perspective and insights.
We talked with Juliana Castro Varón (she/her) is a designer, writer, technologist, and the founder of Cita Press. With a decade of experience working for museums, universities, non-profits, and agencies, she strives to lead projects that spark curiosity, raise questions, and charm audiences.
Juliana is a Fellow at Harvard University, where she researches the history of misleading photo manipulation, from darkroom to AI.
In this episode, Juliana shared more about the evolution of image manipulation, challenges in publishing, navigating creativity and accessibility in design and balancing creative roles.
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What does it mean to be a Latina for you?
I think culture and heritage influence my work and my life in both visible and invisible ways. I don’t miss food or rain or sun every day. Sun a little bit, but I do miss people and culture and language, and I think we all are a sort of collection of the things we’ve lived and experienced. And I do think there is kind of a shared humor and energy to Latin American people, and I like that. And so I miss kind of like the, and strive to find it here, the sort of energy that we share. So I’m very excited to be here because of that.
You have witnessed the devolution of image manipulation techniques to the era of artificial intelligence. And what impact has this progression had on your career, and perhaps on yourself as well?
There are three different factors that influence how we interact with images. One is the cultural moment. I’ll tell you a story to kind of riff off that. The other one is how they’re distributed. Right now we have the Internet, but before images came mainly either through visiting cars or the newspaper, and then before they came through email, but we didn’t have social media, so there was still a kind of a direct type of communication or a platform-based, like a newspaper, and then how the technology works.
There’s one story that I like telling a lot. There is this one guy who is actually not far from where I live. I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He kind of started doing photographs, and he was just really taken with the art of photography. This is in the 18 hundreds, mid-18 hundreds. He started creating photographs and telling people that he was able to photograph the dead, like the deceased people of the world, and he sold people pictures of ghosts.
You would come to his studio and you would sit there and he would take your photo, and then he would give you a photo of you and then the ghostly, like, picture of a person in your family or in your life that had passed. This was at the time, obviously, photography was brand new, a couple of decades old. It was shocking in the first place that you could take pictures of people, right? Electricity didn’t exist. The cultural context is extremely important.
So it was so brand new that people were like, yeah, why not? Probably is able to photograph ghosts, right? Like ten years before, we could have photographed people, now we can photograph ghosts. This is technology, this is how it works. This guy makes a fortune. The promise of this goes on to photograph Abraham Lincoln’s wife after Lincoln is assassinated.
When I talk about the cultural moment, it’s important here in particular to remember that the moment where this happens, the civil war in the US had just taken place. Everybody had lost, like, most people had lost somebody in the war, and they were very eager to connect with them. This kind of connection and this comfort was promised through the photographs. I think there is, in what may happen with AI, a lot of, kind of like, what we want AI to do for us is as crucial as what AI does.
The qualities that we give AI, and the expectations that we put on AI influence very much what will. I mean, images are very subjective. They have always been. We’re going to come up with ways of accounting for the images that are unreal, like false. It’s important that, for example, between the moment in which this guy, William Lumbler, was taking the photographs, to the moment that they discovered that taking photographs of ghosts didn’t happen.
This guy made a fortune. He was taken to court for it, for fraud, and he was acquitted because they couldn’t prove that he had fabricated the images. They couldn’t prove that the ghosts didn’t exist and weren’t actually photographed, which is just fascinating to me because that’s a little bit of how we relate to technology nowadays. It’s really hard to explain exactly why AI would produce some results? So it’s mysterious and it’s fascinating. I went a little long with that anecdote, but I just love that story.
There is like a literacy to understand that something is a scam and you don’t come with it. You don’t come out and just be like, yeah, obviously it’s sort of educational to some degree. I don’t mean this in the traditional sense, I mean this in the sense of exposure. You’ve seen the memes of the Nigerian prince giving you money through, you don’t fall for it. But that doesn’t mean we don’t fall for Photoshop images that look very realistic 20 or 30 years ago, because we’ve kind of rained our eyes, especially if you have a background inside, you can tell, but we won’t always be able to tell. They’re just going to get better.
I am more an optimist or a person who’s very informed in that. I do think there’s going to be a lot of victims in this kind of learning curve, but I think I’m kind of like, the general impact, it’s going to be positive. It’s important to account for all the instances in which you want, mainly because there’s very little stopping it, if that makes sense.
I think there are many arguments to stop it and it’s not going to stop the development of stop. I don’t think it’s worth making an argument to stop it. There are many arguments to be made about accounting for its risks, its current contemporary risks, and not kind of like the risks of when the technology hits.
It’s important to care about this now, but I think it’s also important to not come at it with a defeated mindset, because we have had this like nothing is true anymore. Many times we had it with Photoshop, we had it with digital photographs. There was a full, time where photographers would not even be sent to report journalistic stories with digital cameras. They would only go with film because they were more real.
Now we know that a camera, meaning a photo, is a photo as a photo, but now there’s AI. So is that a photo, like, just kind of like. The terms and the ways in which we talk about reality and its representation have changed radically. I don’t think this is the end of the truth.
Could you share with us the challenges you’ve faced and the successes you’ve encountered in bridging linguistic and cultural gaps in the publishing industry?
I think there is a sort of otherness that comes with bridging those gaps between language and culture and so on. It’s sort of a double-edged sword. On one hand, you have an advantage. You have a kind of access to an extra world of understanding, language, and influence, and then on the other one, you have that otherness I’m talking about, or you have an accent or tacit expectation put onto you.
The main challenge that I encounter, I moved to the US in 2016, so it’s been eight years. I was back in Colombia during the pandemic for a little bit, and I’ve spoken English for many years. I learned it in school, but there was kind of a gap between speaking English and being able to sophisticatedly say what I think, what I want to express in English.
I always thought of myself as a sophisticated thinker, and then when I would speak, it would just come up so bland, so kind of see, this is exactly what’s happening right now. The main challenge has been just to kind of convince myself that I am equally smart and that my thoughts, even though they have bait and they have to kind of. Sometimes they happen in translation right now, they just kind of come out in English because that’s where I speak the most.
Initially, I thought it was a negative kind of a challenge, as you say. Now, I think it’s an extra skill. I do extra work, and I think that extra work pays off. Right? Like, in how I think about things, I have to think about them twice. I think about them with two glasses, I guess. In terms of successes, I can do it right. I’m on a podcast, speaking in English. Whatever. I think it’s done because I’m doing it.
I think you just kind of put on your international English-speaking hat. It happened to me when I started. What? I can make people laugh in English. I’m like, yes. Because I just felt like there was just like an abyss between conversational, funny Spanish, where you can be quick and witty and just so fast that you can anticipate the funny thing. If English is so hard again, because you’re, like, just doing double work. So just slowly starting to happen that I’m able to just be like this, can say things quickly and be funny. I feel like I’m tapping onto myself when I do that, in a way.
Can you share more about Cita Press?
Cita Press is a multifaceted endeavor encompassing publishing, design, and advocacy. Our mission is to curate a library of books authored by women, with a focus on making literature accessible to all. Each book we publish, available in both English and Spanish, is offered free of charge as an ebook. We primarily select works that are in the public domain, allowing us to pair contemporary writers and designers to reintroduce these timeless classics to modern audiences.
Our approach involves contextualizing these works for today’s readers, with introductions that highlight their significance and relevance, particularly from feminist perspectives. Additionally, our design team crafts contemporary covers that resonate with present-day sensibilities.
Thanks to the support of the Melan Foundation, we have expanded our efforts to include a design studio, where we offer editorial and design services to clients. On our website, visitors can explore our collection of books available for download, printing, or purchase. We also provide interactive ebook formats to enhance the reading experience.
Beyond publishing, we engage with our audience through book-binding workshops, reading guides, and social media content. Our journey began as a thesis project during my master’s studies, relying on the generosity of friends to contribute their time and talents. Today, we are proud to compensate our contributors and invite everyone to explore our catalog on our website.
How do you navigate the intersection of creativity and accessibility?
I think it’s very important to consider all the ways in which people can interact with your content, especially when we think about ourselves. I’ll use one example to make this argument. When I watch TV, I watch it with subtitles, especially when I watch British shows. The only exception is when I’m watching stand-up comedy because I don’t want the joke to be given to me before the subtitles. Otherwise, I watch TV with subtitles every single time. That is a feature that was not built for me, an immigrant person. It’s a feature that was built for people who couldn’t hear or didn’t hear very well. It was designed with a different user in mind, and I benefit from it.
So I think of accessibility in terms of features that serve some people but could actually serve everybody, just like positive features. Considering all the ways in which people can interact with one content is always positive, not only for those people but for everybody. Of course, I think it’s important we adhere to all the alt text images and more classical accessibility standards, including subtitles and so on.
However, I do believe we’ve tried to build, especially in the reader, some agency for the user to choose what is an acceptable type size. You can blow it up a lot, and it looks kind of cool, or you can space it out. I think the mix of agency for the user and thinking of features as default options should just exist by default.
How do you manage your time between being a maker and a manager?
I’m fortunate to work in areas where people are genuinely enthusiastic about our projects. That makes it easy because we’re all working together toward a common goal, whether it’s creating charming books or designing a cool website, and so on.
Working with creative individuals is exhilarating, and I believe it’s essential to collaborate with those who approach things differently. I aim to manage and steward the creativity of others, nurturing their creative endeavors and fostering an environment where creativity can flourish. Creating a mission-oriented environment that celebrates the work of women and creative individuals is important to me, as it encourages people to engage with and appreciate such work.
These aspects feed off each other, contributing to the creation of positive environments. As a small team, we have agile processes, which differ greatly from those in larger or more siloed teams. While I may not have specific advice, I believe that open conversation and effective communication are vital.
In terms of my professional identity, I see all my endeavors as interconnected. While it can sometimes be challenging to convey this to prospective employers, I liken it to acupuncture: seemingly unrelated actions can have significant impacts when viewed holistically. Similarly, I consider myself primarily a designer, focusing on problem-solving, product development, and understanding audiences and users. Building upon this foundation, I develop products and, in my consulting work, leverage design thinking and methodologies to assess various situations.
While it’s possible that I may eventually gravitate more toward one career path, for now, I appreciate the diverse influences on my work and aim to integrate them harmoniously. Storytelling is paramount in my view. It’s an effective way to communicate ideas, engage with others, and simply enjoy each other’s company.
In terms of resources, is there anything that you feel helped in your journey that you want to share with us today?
One book that left a lasting impression on me is “How to Do Nothing” by Jenny Odell, which I read a few years ago. It’s a captivating exploration of technology and the importance of mindful attention in our daily lives. The book resonated with me deeply, as it encouraged me to pay closer attention to the world around me. I also appreciate how it relates to my work in technology and creation. Additionally, any book from Cita Press is fantastic.
I hope you enjoyed the podcast. We will have more interviews with amazing Latinx and Caribbean leaders the first Tuesday of every month. Check out our website Latinx In Power to hear more. Don’t forget to share comments and feedback, always with kindness. See you soon.
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Additional Reading Mentioned in the Interview
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