Caspar Jade makes AI portraits that read like editorial photography — cinematic, narrative, built around a face. The tagline on his site reads: "All images are AI generated. But the emotions they create are real."
And his most obsessive project, The Unreal People, pushed that idea to 471 portraits: a new fictional person every day from March 2024 to June 2025, each with a first-person life story — a 36-year-old Australian footballer facing retirement, a 69-year-old Ankara shopkeeper watching inflation eat her shop.
None of them exist.
Two names, never mixed
Caspar Jade is the alias of Hannes Caspar, a portrait photographer based in Berlin. Per his agency, he spent 16 years photographing people from film, music, and fashion, shooting covers for Stern, Die Zeit, and Playboy, plus album covers for artists like Namika and Yvonne Catterfeld. That's the craft underneath the AI work — he was directing faces and light for magazines long before a model could render them.
When he launched the alias in July 2023, he explained the split in the announcement post on his photography account: "I think that AI images and real images should never mix, that's why I separate it with two different names and accounts. I still enjoy shoots a lot. There is no substitute for the intimate collaboration with people."
He's kept that firewall since — two names, two portfolios, two Instagram accounts. The AI one, @caspar.jade, has grown to 238K followers.
471 people who never existed
The Unreal People ran as a daily blog: one photorealistic portrait, one short first-person story "completed with the help of artificial intelligence," as the site puts it. Each character comes from a different country — the image files are literally named turkey.jpg, finnland.jpg, chad.jpg. The project's stated point is the mirror it holds up: "None of it is real. And yet, it holds up a mirror to us. It invites reflection on identity: Who are we? What defines us?"
It also became a science collaboration — the site partnered with the AFC Lab of cognitive neuroscientist Prof. Dr. Meike Ramon, whose research focuses on how we visually process and recognize faces. Fictional faces that fool people daily turn out to be useful to someone studying exactly that.
What the run gave him personally, he told L'Officiel Monaco: "Even though the project has something grotesque and provocative about it, I immerse myself in other realities and learn a lot about our world and different cultures… It teaches empathy and makes me realize again and again how incredibly privileged we are in the Western world."
The daily streak stopped in June 2025, with no announcement — the archive just ends at portrait number 471.
Decisions, not prompts
His description of the actual work is the least mystical explanation of AI art you'll find: "It is the computer that generates the images, but I make the many small decisions that have significant impact on the effect of an image."
He's never named his generator on his own pages. His site's image files tell on him a little, though — the gallery uploads carry raw Midjourney output filenames, prompt fragments intact, and they read like a photographer typing: "Fashion Photography of woman…", "Polaroid of a woman wearing clothes made entirely of…", "Pinhole portrait photography of a bizarre haunting eerie…" The prompts are camera language.
His sharpest observation is about what the tools do to everyone using them, from the MOD Magazine interview: "It is the algorithms of the respective tools that dictate an aesthetic direction, which means that the images resemble each other regardless of who generated them. It is more difficult than in photography to express oneself individually. But it is definitely possible!"
The photographer's bet on photography
For someone this deep into generated portraits, his prediction for the real kind is generous: "In individual portrait photography, not so much will change. I think there will even be a countermovement, the real and authentic will get a special value again."
The AI work keeps compounding anyway. He showed in the AI Creative Showcase at London's Cluster Photography & Print Fair in April 2025, shot an AI cover story for MOD Magazine, and his Inner Bloom series — motion-filled fine-art portraits, wind and fabric everywhere — got a 24-image feature this past February. And the photography career keeps running next door under his real name, exactly as he set it up: two names, never mixed.