AI image tools are built on billions of cataloged images.
That’s how the tool knows it’s looking at a cat. Billions of people said so. Tag it. Train it. Done.
Which creates a problem when you’re trying to picture Abraham.
The Internet Doesn’t Have Candid Shots of Paul
Nobody snapped a photo at the Damascus Road. There are no street portraits from ancient Judea sitting in a photo archive somewhere.
What the internet does have — in abundance — are European paintings. Centuries of them. Painted by artists who inserted their own culture, their own faces, their own assumptions into the frame.
Lily white Jesus. Every time.
So when you ask an AI tool to render a Bible character, it reaches for what it knows. And what it knows is those paintings.
That’s not history. That’s projection.
The Casting Call Problem
My first attempts looked like Central Casting showed up.
Perfect faces. Heroic jawlines. Cinematic lighting. Everyone looked like they were auditioning for a major motion picture.
That’s not who these people were.
They were normal. Weathered. Asymmetrical. Real faces have quirks — the left side doesn’t match the right, the nose has character, the ears have opinions about proportion.
AI has gotten extraordinarily good at facial perfection. That was the enemy of what I was after.
Finding the Right Ancestry
Here’s the question I started asking for every character:
If Isaac were alive today, what would he look like? Who alive now shares that heritage?
The ancient Near East has living descendants. The lineage of Judah didn’t vanish — it continued, migrated, survived. There are people alive today who carry those features in their faces.
So I do that research for every character. Find the living connection. Build from there.
Now the AI tool has something real to work with — a contemporary reference pool instead of a gallery of European oil paintings.
The Camera I Brought Into the Scene
Every portrait is shot as if I’m walking around with my old Nikon F2. 35mm f/1.4 lens. Plus-X loaded1.
That whole world is the projection.
Not documenting. Being there. Thinking in black and white. Thinking about light and shadow and moment.
I don’t speak the language. I’m standing on the ground. I’m trying to capture something real before it disappears.
A few relevant props in the frame to anchor the story. Nothing staged. Nothing theatrical.
And then the moment arrives when the image starts to take shape on my screen — the same held breath as watching a print come up in the developer. Something emerging from nothing. You nudge it. You wait. You see if it’s what you hoped it would be.
The tools are different. The feeling is similar (not the same… similar).
What MidJourney Makes Possible
Every image in this series was created in MidJourney.
Built around two ideas: find their living heritage, then make them human. Imperfect. Interesting.
Not a movie. Not a painting.
Just someone you might have actually met.
- Kodak B&W Film – Fine grain. Beautiful tonal range. The kind of film you shot knowing you’d be spending time in the darkroom later — developing the roll, watching the print slowly emerge in the developer tray under the red safelight. ↩︎