A-Thrice | AI-assisted photographic reconstruction, archival research, digital panoramic art and interactive exhibition

What lies beyond the edges of a historical photograph—and who decided what was worth remembering?

Out of Frame: The Making of a Trophy is a research-led series of three AI-assisted panoramic artworks that reconsider historical photographs of elite hunting expeditions, royal ceremonies and colonial-era displays of prestige.

The project begins with authentic archival photographs depicting Theodore Roosevelt's 1909 expedition in East Africa, King George V's 1911 hunting visit to Nepal, and a late nineteenth-century tiger-hunting party associated with Maharaja Nripendra Narayan of Cooch Behar.

Each historical photograph presents a carefully arranged scene of achievement and authority. Celebrated figures occupy the centre, animals become trophies, and the camera transforms complex events into seemingly self-contained records of success.

A-Thrice expands these images beyond their original boundaries, using AI-assisted reconstruction informed by historical research. The original photographs remain visibly distinct as archival objects, while newly imagined colour panoramas reveal the wider social, logistical and political systems surrounding them.

In Buffalo Corner, Roosevelt's posed expedition portrait becomes the centre of a larger East African landscape. The expanded scene introduces the camp workers, specimen preparation, transport and provisioning that sustained the celebrated expedition, challenging the idea of hunting as an individual heroic achievement.

The Royal Ring examines George V's privileged position during a royal hunt in Nepal. The reconstructed surroundings draw attention to the elephants, handlers, organisers and political authority of Nepal's Rana government. Rather than treating Nepal as a passive backdrop, the work examines how diplomatic hospitality and specialist labour made royal spectacle possible.

The Host and the Trophy revisits a tiger-hunting photograph associated with the princely state of Cooch Behar. Its expanded landscape examines the infrastructure of royal hospitality, elephant management and transport while questioning the distinction between being visible in a photograph and being identified in the historical record.

The exhibition also investigates what happens after a photograph is taken: how captions, albums, publications, collectors and archives transform an event into an enduring historical narrative.

AI is central to the artistic method, but the project deliberately rejects the idea that generative reconstruction can recover an undocumented past. The expanded scenes are visual interpretations, not rediscovered photographs. They combine documented historical context with explicitly acknowledged artistic conjecture.

An accompanying interactive digital exhibition allows visitors to examine the original photographs, explore reconstructed details and access research chapters distinguishing evidence, uncertainty and interpretation.

By expanding the field of vision, Out of Frame questions the authority of the photographic frame itself.

The work asks how a dead animal became a trophy, how a trophy became an image of prestige, and how that image shaped the people and events history chose to remember.

The image ends. The questions do not.