Image-making is the worked domain that proves the normative apex, the judgment topology, and artifact governance hold across tool stacks — photography, transformation, and generation. The role is structural, not art-historical: the domain is the worked example; the primitives are the durable element. The full evidence base, mechanisms, and anchors live operator-side; this surface carries only what makes the method principles visible, once.

The thesis the domain proves: authorship lives in source of intent, bounded discretion, judgment-bearing intervention, selection, and closure — not in the apparatus, the provenance, or the pixels. A new tool stack changes who or what executes; it does not relocate the apex.

• Capture is selection (Szarkowski). Lens-based photography selects from an actuality that exceeds the image: the frame, the vantage point, the parcel of time, and the detail are authorial cuts, not neutral transcription. The apparatus performs causal work; the source of intent decides which relation becomes durable. Authorship is present even when the hand leaves no visible trace — the clean public grammar of selection · frame · time · vantage point.

• Delegated realization (Sol LeWitt). A wall drawing separates LeWitt's source of intent and plan from the drafter who realizes it. The certificate carries and authenticates authorized lineage; it does not originate intent. The work survives non-identical realizations and even retained errors. Delegation is not transfer of source of intent. It is also the cleanest case of the judgment topology: judgment is classified by the execution span, not by who executes — a drafter interpreting a score executes and judges; an ordinary model-sampling span executes without judging, not because it is a model but because the span does not evaluate admissible alternatives against the governing standard and bind. A span is judgment-bearing when an authorized decision-maker — human or computational — evaluates admissible alternatives against the governing standard and binds within scope; a computational agent qualifies only by satisfying that functional test.

• Aggregation is not an apex (Komar & Melamid, America's Most Wanted). A statistical composite of polled preferences can constrain a painting without becoming its source of intent: the respondents judged, the arithmetic did not. Judgment in the inputs does not propagate through synthesis. The work is deeply authored by the artists who framed the procedure and closed the result; the average is material, not author. The constituting move — a poll aggregates, a constituted collective decides — is the image-domain instance of constitutive governance.

• Expressive execution inside authored conditions (studioLeoV). A collaborative body of works on paper in which ASK authors the project-level source of intent — substrate sourcing, the conditions for making, the body-of-work frame (continuity, collection, presentation, curation), selection, and closure — while LeoV's drawing supplies a live, judgment-bearing expressive span inside those conditions. Unlike an instructed realization, the marks are not specified by ASK; LeoV's expression is the generative middle. The case separates source of intent from expressive execution without making the executor hollow. Bounded generativity with a high-discretion human realization span.

Domain depth lives in the source layer, not here:

• the photography-profile architecture (selection / abstraction / disclosure), the realization architecture, the full anchor set, and the disclosure / claim-register treatment;
• the verification requirements for any quoted source (named works, dates, and methodology are confirmed in the source layer before publication);
• the contemporary "the model did it" arguments, which are a new tool-stack instance of an older source-of-intent confusion, argued in the essay line.

The repo carries the structural articulation once; the article and source layers carry the evidence depth. When the domain refines a principle further, it routes through the source layer, not by expanding this example.