Wolfgang Tillmans is a German photographer. He has taken many pictures which are now considered cultural landmarks, especially around 80s and 90s counter culture.

He is the creator of the famous Kiss:

as well as this picture with a long title which I like:

Later in his career, Tillmans switched to controlling the development process more and more and using that to produce art:

Abstractions and chemicals

Eventually he made sets of pictures that were entirely created by exposing photographic paper to various sources of light in a dark room, then also controlling and introducing various objects and agents in the chemical mix of the development process. The end results looked like this:

I find this fascinating, because rather than aim for an expected result (point the camera somewhere and click), he is rather controlling the process of creating a picture and producing a random result that obeys specific parameters. It’s hard not to draw parallels with modern AIs like ChatGPT or Midjourney that operate in similar ways, based on a prompt. Yet the prompt still captures an intention, while controlling the process is much more subtle in guiding intentions. Systemic Design comes to mind as well, the act of developing a system that will achieve what you want, rather than doing it directly, like Alan Turing did with his Enigma-breaking machines