AI, CGI, real - and everything in between. For his latest project centred on the Bugatti La Voiture Noire, Torsten Klinkow deliberately dissolves the boundary between documentary photography and digital construction.
Torsten tells GoSee: "Our starting point was the idea of dissolving the boundaries between reality and simulation - weaving AI, CGI and photographic fragments together so precisely that their transitions become imperceptible. Not simply as a technical exercise, but as an image-making practice: a work about perception, fiction and digital materiality.
A key moment was encountering the car itself during the 110th anniversary of Bugatti, where I was able to capture reference images - almost like visual notes for something that would later not be documented, but reconstructed.
At the centre was La Voiture Noire - this almost mythical one-off, valued at around €17 million, surrounded by speculation, legend, and rumours that it belongs to Cristiano Ronaldo. But more compelling than ownership is its aura: an object somewhere between engineering and apparition. Formally based on the Chiron and conceived as a tribute to the lost Type 57 SC Atlantic, the car carries an almost ghost-like historical depth. Its 8.0-litre W16 engine with 1,500 horsepower feels less like mechanics and more like an exaggerated symbol of excess, speed, and obsession.
What interested us was not just the car as an icon, but its digital rebirth. With meticulous precision, we reconstructed every detail for which no usable data or photographic references existed - surfaces, proportions, reflections, shadows, material behaviour.
The result is neither a conventional render nor pure photography, but a hybrid image where documentary reality and synthetic construction become inseparable. It is precisely within this in-between space that the real tension lies for us - when technology no longer merely represents, but begins to construct entirely new realities.”
“It isn’t a car - it’s a blackout. Pure presence, no noise, just 1500hp sitting there like it knows it already won.
One of one. Deep black carbon, stretched low, like a shadow that somehow became real.
Six exhausts in the back like a statement - not subtle, not sorry.
It carries old Bugatti ghosts, but flips them into something way more now, way more savage.
This thing doesn’t chase attention. It deletes everything around it.”
AI + CG project Bugatti La Voiture Noire by Torsten KLINKOW
Project: Bugatti -  La Voiture Noire
Represented by: Severin Wendeler
Photographer: Torsten Klinkow
AI, CG: Ken&Torsten
Post Production: Torsten Klinkow