The Getty Museum has acquired its first artificial intelligence-generated photograph. The work Cristian en el Amor de Calle (2024), by queer Costa Rican photographer Matías Sauter Morera, depicts two young Latino men in blue leather jackets with gold embellishments in a bar or café. There is an intensity in the central figure’s outward gaze. The piece recalls the queer history of pegamachos, or cowboys from the Guanacaste Coast, who became renowned for their secret affairs with young gay men.
Given their undercover lifestyle, anonymity is paramount to guarding the pegamachos’ safety. As such, Morera employed AI to create the work and hide people’s real identities.
“AI provided a way also to achieve this without intruding on real lives or placing real Costa Rican faces that people of the community might recognize,” Morera told Artnet News. “Since the pegamachos culture remains hidden, these AI images serve as a mimicry of photography, a fiction, and a medium through which I can imagine and construct an imagined parallel history.”
To create Cristian en el Amor de Calle, Morera combined multiple AI models in Adobe Photoshop to create his pegamacho subjects and place them in imagined scenarios without need for censorship.
The Getty Museum acquired the work through its photography curator Paul Martineau, who considers this piece to be a photograph rather than a work of AI.
AI has been a hot button issue among the art world since its inception. Most recently, thousands of artists released an open letter demanding that the auction house Christie’s cancel its upcoming AI art sale, with some saying that AI models exploit human creativity.
The acquired photograph Cristian en el Amor de Calle by Morera will be shown in the upcoming solo exhibition “Pegamachos” at Craig Kroll Gallery from March 22 through May 3, 2025, as well as the group show “The Queer Lens: A History of Photography,” both curated by Martineau, at the Getty Museum from June 17 through September 28, 2025.
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