Airport Photos

speculative short story, 2025

A synthetic image of a retro diner on a street corner: checkered floors, marble columns, waiters in matching uniforms carrying silver trays, large mirrors along the walls. The colors are flat and the food is indistinct.

Airport Photos is a short story set in a country that has confiscated every private camera. A state-run generative model, MemoreVisium (MV), is now the only lawful source of images, and anyone who wants a picture types a description into an MV terminal and gets back a generated print. The narrator, a visitor leaving the country, uses the terminal at the airport to picture the best meal of their trip, then spends the rest of the wait trying to get it right. I wrote it to work through a tension from an interview study with documentary photographers.

Presented at the HCI Design Stories workshop at CHI 2025, Yokohama.

Read the story (PDF).