A decade ago, Swedish photographer Arvida Byström was known for being one of the first creatives to popularize the term female gaze. She did so by creating images that affirm women’s points of view in a male-dominated industry. Her latest body of work, In the Clouds, finds her yet again, asserting women’s agency in a very specific type of photography.
In the Clouds is a compendium of 200 pages of AI-generated nudes of Byström herself. Over the years, she has been selling these images on Sunroom, an online marketplace for nude photos and videos in par with OnlyFans.
By doing so, Byström is raising questions around women’s agency in sex work and the stigma that comes with working in the industry. Women are often sexualized in art, film and photography, and yet the moment women decide to capitalize on their own sexuality, they are shunned and discriminated against, as if their profession as sex workers determines their worth as human beings.
Byström’s In the Clouds probes into this stigma by creating AI to generate her nudes and then selling them for a profit. In doing so, she is divorcing sex work from a woman’s body. Divorcing it from the very thing that society uses to stigmatize women who are sex workers.
The stigma takes root in the idea that a woman’s body should be priceless. Hence, when sex workers put a price tag on their bodies, they are making their bodies (and themselves as a whole) worth less than those who are not sex workers.
Yet by divorcing sex work from a woman’s real body, Byström shows that sex work does not have anything to do with a woman’s body, much less with her worth as an entirety. It is simply a line of work, one that provides services and goods in exchange for currency.
This allows Byström to create a more equitable view of sex work. One that affirms sex work is work, free from societal stigma against women in the industry. This allows her piece to reflect the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of Gender Equality and Decent Work and Economic Growth, Reduced Inequalities.
In the Clouds, as a project began when Byström encountered a website which claimed that for a certain price, it could use AI to undress anyone, provided that images of their face were AI-generated, provided as a sample. These types of services have often been used for sexual misconduct, when everyday women and celebrities alike have had AI-generated nude photographs of them circulated on the internet without their consent.
This gave Byström an idea. As a public figure herself, she thought about how people might have already made AI-generated nudes of her, and if they haven’t yet, they will soon. So what was stopping her from capitalizing on this tool?
The resulting images have varying degrees of “realness” to them. Some appear more AI-generated, with stray limbs and additional sec breasts, while others seem indistinguishable from other nude photographs found on the internet. In total, Byström had managed to sell these photographs on Sunroom for up to USD 10,000 each. Creating a series of lucrative photographs which also affirms sex work as work in the process.
Find out more about In the Clouds and other pieces by Arvida Byström by checking their Instagram on @arvidabystrom.