[Your Name/Institution] Date: April 14, 2026
Portraiture Imagenomic: Toward a Theory of Generative Identity in the Digital Gaze portraiture imagenomic
Portraiture, Imagenomics, Generative AI, Digital Identity, Algorithmic Image, Computational Photography 1. Introduction: The Crisis of the Referent For centuries, Western portraiture operated under what John Berger called the “likeness contract”: the subject sat, the artist observed, and the resulting image stood as a trace of a unique individual. Photography intensified this contract, promising chemical indexicality. Yet today, a smartphone portrait is not a single exposure but a computational composite—stitched from multiple frames, enhanced by neural networks, and filtered through real-time facial landmark detection. When this image is then fed into a generative model (e.g., Stable Diffusion, Midjourney) to produce “variations,” we witness a fundamental rupture: the portrait no longer refers backward to a sitting body but forward to a family of possible images. Yet today, a smartphone portrait is not a