by John Szarkowski, the legendary former curator of the Museum of Modern Art, once described photography as “the act of pointing.” And for nearly 200 years since its creation, photography has been about capturing a visual perspective of the physical world using light: first with light-sensitive plates, then with film, then with digital sensors. When digital cameras became widely available, many photographers lamented the move away from analog technology, but basically Szarkowski’s definition still held: Photography is about pointing, in reaction to something that exists in the world.
However, with the advent of AI image generators, this definition seems obsolete.
Generative AI tools can produce photorealistic images, usually in response to written prompts. These images are available to purchase from major stock photography agencies along with traditional photography. They routinely go viral before being debunked. Even occasionally win prestigious photography awards. All of which has reignited a two-century-old debate: what exactly is a photograph?
This is not a question of etymological minutiae. Calling AI images “photographs,” a practice I often encounter, can add to a sense of disorientation in what already feels like a deeply disorienting moment. Thanks to the ubiquity of digital cameras, we live in a world that is already inundated with photographs; More than a billion are extracted every year. These digital images can already be easily manipulated through existing tools, including those built into your phone. However, they still have some direct relationship to actual scenes and events that have occurred.
Now we are faced with a new avalanche of images that, no matter how clever or compelling, are removed from the world. AI images are typically digital composites of countless existing photographs, so by what definition are they real? No wonder some observers wonder: How can we believe everything we see?
Aside from the very real concerns about the livelihoods of professional photographers, especially those working in commercial photography, I worry that AI image generators could leave society as a whole more vulnerable to widespread manipulation, as portends the deception AI Images of Donald Trump violently resisting arrest or, more comically, of Pope Francis wearing a Balenciaga-inspired coat.
But for all the negative potential, I can also see the possibility that these developments will start a conversation about all visual media and the relationship of these images, no matter how they are made, to the so-called truth and encourage educated skepticism about them .
Artists, writers, and theorists have long pointed out our very human tendency to project slippery ideas about truth onto two-dimensional surfaces. In 1921, Franz Kafka was told of a miraculous machine that could automatically take a portrait, a “Know Thyself Mechanical.” He offered his name for the device: “The Error Itself.” Kafka was ahead of his time. In Susan Sontag’s 1977 essay “In Plato’s Cave,” she wrote: “Although in a sense the camera captures reality, it does not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings.” Every photograph, he argued, is inevitably the product of countless decisions informed, consciously or not, by the photographer’s predilections and prejudices, as well as by the limits and parameters of technology.
So when I hear some people call the arrival of AI an extinction event for photography, I often think of the French painter Paul Delaroche who, legend has it, declared painting “dead” after seeing a daguerreotype, one of the first photographic inventions. . The painting did not die; it simply evolved into a different kind of art, free from the obligations of verisimilitude.
Photography has reached a similar crossroads. So I asked four artists who work with AI-generated imagery (Alejandro Cartagena, Charlie Engman, Trevor Paglen, and Laurie Simmons) to talk to me about how they think about the technology and where we might go from here.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
Gideon Jacobs: Alejandro, you are probably the one with the most experience here in documentary photography. How do you feel when AI images are called photos?
Alejandro Cartagena (photographer and editor of Fellowship, a site dedicated to elevating photography and exploring post-photographic images): Yes, these images are photographic, in a sense. For example, computer models understand photographic framing. They understand how to use the horizon. They know how to frame a portrait based on 180 years of photographic diarrhea. These models look at images and the most predominant type of image is photography. I think this type of technology was inevitable because what else were we supposed to do with the billions of images that had been generated?
Jacobs: That’s very interesting: the idea that these image generators were somehow the natural next step, that we had to find a way to make the excess of photographs useful, otherwise we would have spent the last century accumulating a huge and useless pile of visual garbage. noise.
Laurie Simmons (artist and photographer): Terrence McKenna once said, “Stop consuming images and start producing them,” which is an interesting take on what I’ve been doing. My first AI message was on September 2, 2022, and it was something like: I saw the earth move! I felt like an AI whisperer. But at the same time, it raised a lot of questions and made me take two consecutive paths: the path of doing my job and the path of trying to understand what was happening with this technology culturally, politically and corporately. sense.
Jacobs: Many have acknowledged the use of manipulative tools like Photoshop and digital filters for decades, but I don’t remember those conversations being as heated as the current one around AI images. It seems really difficult to orient yourself or take a position on AI when the landscape is constantly changing. Laurie, has working with an AI imager like DALL.E ever felt like a photographic process? Do the resulting images look like photographs to you?
Simmons: Not really, but I don’t consider myself a photographer. I am an artist who uses a camera. I see these AI images in this kind of interstitial space between drawings, photographs and sculptures. They exist somewhere I don’t yet have the language for.
Charlie Engman (photographer and director): I am interested in photographic images because of their ostensible relationship with reality, truth or whatever. With AI, an important criterion for me is how well it is able to create photographic-looking images. Personally, I’m not interested in systems that create images that look like paintings, illustrations, or three-dimensional renderings. I am interested in the photographic image because it has some kind of direct line to a notion of truth. Even though I know the images are not true, that they have never been true, a part of me does believe the images. Part of my interaction with photographs is a willing suspension of disbelief.
Trevor Paglen (artist and geographer): The idea that a photograph, in itself, can record some kind of truth has always been a fiction. Look at Gustave Le Gray, From the beginning. Look at spiritual photography. It is not possible to create an unmanipulated image.
Simmons: When I first picked up a camera, I was interested in the fact that the images could lie, that the camera could lie. I was never interested in the truth, which is why working with AI is such a natural progression for me.
Paglen: You never trust a photograph, do you? I’m less worried that we’re going to lose some sense of being able to use images to make sense of the world, because we’ve never made sense of the world just by looking at images. When we do, we end up in the strange territory of the Loch Ness monsters.
Cartagena: Everything is subjective. Everything is a selection of reality, therefore it is not reality, it is not true.
Jacobs: The immense size of the data sets and the way AI generators connect language and image make me wonder if these images are the closest humanity will get to some version of idealism, to seeing the concept of forms of Plato. Perhaps the result of DALL.E with the message of a word like “cute” is the closest thing we will have to a consensus on what “cute” looks like.
Charlie Engman: I recently had a article about my AI work published in The New Yorker, and in it I said rather flippantly: The amazing thing about AI is that I can take like 300 photographs a day. Of course, people on the Internet interpret this as the death of creativity! What was so interesting to me is that labor (the time spent creating an image) was an assumed value metric. So if you can do it that fast, it’s not art.
Cartagena: But the same thing happened when cinema went digital. I remember the heated conversations at the photography club where everyone said, “Can you make 300 images in one session? That is not right! “That’s not real photography.”
Jacobs: Reactions to large technological leaps often tend to fall into one of three camps: the alarmist camp, which views the technological leap as negative and unprecedented; an optimistic camp, which considers the leap to be positive and unprecedented; and then a field we might call the perspectivist field, which tries to keep things in historical perspective by assuming that the jump is similar in some way to previous jumps, jumps to which society, to some extent, adapted. So which camp do each of you align with when it comes to AI?
Engman: I would position myself in that last camp, the realistic camp. Obviously, I have embraced AI in my work. I’m excited about its uses from a creative perspective. But I sympathize with people who have anxiety about it, and I think we should look at what those anxieties are.
Jacobs: Trevor, are you feeling optimistic, pessimistic, or somewhere in between?
Paglen: Probably none of those. These fields are based on the premise that the development of technologies and the progress of civilization have something to do with each other, and I don’t think that is the case.
Jacobs: Laurie?
Simmons: I’m going to follow Terence McKenna on this one and tell him that he doesn’t know enough to care.
Jacobs: Alexander?
Cartagena: I guess I’m a perspectivist, because I already went through a cycle of fear and anxiety during the transition from film to digital in the ’90s. I got into photography right at that time, when film photographers were going crazy because they didn’t want digital photography to be called photography. They felt that if there was nothing hitting the physical celluloid, it couldn’t be called photography. I don’t know if it’s PTSD or just the strange feeling of having had similar, heated arguments almost 20 years ago, but having experienced that and seeing that nothing can be done about it once the technology is good enough I think I’m thinking: Why fight it? Is here.
