Whatever it is, it's not photography
Yelling at clouds? Maybe. But definitely not tilting at windmills.
There are many debates about generative AI, images made by “prompt engineering”1. But this essay is not about the energy cost of AI, or the endless consent-free scraping of other peoples work. I’m not going to talk about hands with weird fingers or intersecting limbs but simply about the word “photography”, and what that word means. You may call generative-AI imagery whatever you want, but a picture created by a computer is not photography, and thus should not be treated as such.
Nope.
But, geezer, things change, blah blah blah, get with the beat, Baggy!
Nope. Definitions matter.
“the act of photography requires light”
On March 14th 1839 (186 years ago, as of this writing), a paper was read to the Royal Society, by Sir John Herschel, and it was *cough* a defining point in the craft and art of photography. The title of the talk was,
“Note on the Art of Photography, or the application of the Chemical Rays of Light
to the purposes of Pictorial Representation.”
By
Sir John F. W. Herschel, Bart., K.H., V.P.R.S., &c.
It is generally accepted to be the first appearance of the word “photography” in the English language. There is some discussion about the word appearing before that, in the correspondences of Nicéphore Niépce, but the Herschel paper is usually seen as being the birth of the word2.
The word “photography” derives from a mashup of two separate greek words,
φωτω- (phōtō-) from the Ancient Greek φῶς (phôs, “light”).
And from the Ancient Greek suffix -γράφος (-gráphos, “that writes or describes”),
Simply put, writing with light. Or, perhaps, light that describes. The word doing the heavy lifting is light.
From the very beginning, the act of photography has been defined by light recorded on a light sensitive sensor, be that film or a digital. It can be sunlight, it can be artificial light, it can be intrinsic light or reflected light, light measured in fractions of a second or in hours, but the act of photography requires light. Photons hitting a recording medium. Period. End of story. Thank you all for coming to my Substack talk…
But times change, I hear from the cheap seats, get with the program! Yes, they do, but words still have meanings and I’d like us to hold on to the meaning of this particular word because it genuinely means something. Words like “picture” can connote a painting, a sketch, a graphic, an illustration, a linocut print or computer generated imagery. But only the record of light captured can be a photograph.
In recent years I’ve occasionally seen well-known and respected photographers producing AI generated “photography”, usually in the name of “experimentation”. Images of things they imagined but never saw. Wut? It is a photographers primary job to see things; photographer David Carol said, “My job is to go out into the world and report back”.
For me, generally speaking, photography needs to contain an essential truth;
I was here,
I saw this,
It made me feel something.
And in the making and publishing of the photograph:
I hope my photo makes you feel something too.
The way that a photographer captures a scene involves choices made in lighting, composition, angles, focal lengths etc. The choices made in post-processing (digital or darkroom) are also relevant, changes in contrast, colour saturation etc. You can also crop the image, and “spot” stuff out–dust bunnies, a stray hair or something (photojournalism has more stringent rules). You are making choices in order to express what you saw in the hope that someone else might feel what you felt. There is a very well known quotation, by Henri Cartier-Bresson, that is sometimes cut off at the knees and weakened by the omission. You may be familiar with,
“To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event”.
It is often trotted out in pieces regarding HCB’s renowned “Decisive Moment”. But the second half of that quote is critical to understanding the heart of photography.
“… as well as of a precise organization of forms which gave that event its proper expression.”
All of the choices you make are in service–one hopes–to the notion of giving whatever it is that you’re photographing its “proper expression”.
And in photography, most of those choices are starting with the light coming down the through the glass elements of your camera lens, not light described to a flashing cursor on a computer screen.
How a photographer represents the real world has been a source of tension since the invention of the medium. The first proponents of photography saw it as a way to accurately record the real world but within a short space of time others were committed to creating more artistic photographic renditions of the world. Scotsmen David Octavius Hill (a painter) and Robert Adamson (engineer) were artistically experimenting with salted paper prints as early as 1843, just four years after Herschels’ talk to the Royal Society. In the 1860s English photographer Julia Margaret Cameron started producing images that sought to elevate photography as an art form, saying,
“My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real & the ideal and sacrificing nothing of Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and beauty”.
A little later Henry Peach Robinson constructed images by photographing various elements and then combining them, in the darkroom, to create painterly composites. Robinson was the first to use the word “pictorial” with photography. Heinrich Kühn mixed watercolours with light sensitive salts and gum-arabic, which could be painted onto papers for printing. These were the precursors to the grand Pictorialism movement of Alfred Stieglitz’ “Photo-Secession”.
But all of it is derived from light being recorded onto film (or, today, a digital sensor).
In addition to entirely AI-generated images, there are also AI tools that allow you to remove or add large chunks of a photograph but these are, in my opinion, creating an illustration, a graphic, diluting the truth about the moment you photographed.
The picture, above, was made when the museum was fully open and there were quite a few people around. But I really wanted THIS picture, I wanted this kind of graphic representation of the grandeur of the grand hall. A picture showing all of the people, milling to and fro, speaks of the people and the busy-ness, it tells a different story. I wanted a picture of the enormity of the architecture, with a human for scale (this particular human, of course). So we waited until it was possible. We were ready for the moment, and we got the shot, in camera. For me it tells a singular story of that one time when I took my then-new girlfriend to one of the grandest courts in all of London Town.
Full disclosure, I use AI tools, if I have to, in order to “spot” something out of a picture that I just cannot do otherwise. I’m no Luddite3. But I think that there is a tipping point, betwixt photo and photo-illustration. What’s the point in producing a “photograph” that looks like you were the only person in a place if, in fact, you were surrounded by people the entire time? That’s just illustrating an imagined scenario, a dream. Which is fine if you’re making an illustration.
There are ways of making people disappear in camera, too, is that a photograph or an illustration? Good question, perhaps a quick digression…
Way back in the mists of time I had to produce a picture of a neon lit entranceway in London’s Leicester Square. The brief needed some ambient light vibe with the neon lights prominent but with NO people present. Now, if you’ve ever been to Leicester Square you’ll know that there is rarely a time when people aren’t there. Was there budget for a closed access location shoot? (Proper LOLZ). No, I had to solve the problem photographically. I used a slow film stock, a neutral density filter, a very sturdy tripod, and a long exposure time. It worked out, even though it was a nervous couple of hours waiting for the film to come off the E6 line. There was only one usable frame on the roll but sometimes one frame is all you need.
Is this a photograph or an illustration? Given that everything in the picture was actually there in the scene, every photon of light came through the lens of my camera, I’d like to think it was more of a photographic illustration than an illustration, per se.
But what’s the point in removing a large object in a photo when the data that replaces it does not exist outside of the mathematics of the AI “black box”? Several Adobe ads show the removal of people and things to create an image that says something like, “look at me! All alone on this beach in paradise!” while, of course, nothing of the sort was happening. Not only did it not happen but areas of the picture are now entirely “made up”, computer-generated pixels. You didn’t see that, those pixels didn’t originate in your camera.
If you imagine a scene and use AI to create it, ok, have at it4, but it just isn’t photography (whether it constitutes “art” or not is a broader conversation).
Hilariously, I read a comment, a while ago, that said something along the lines of
“…but photoshop has been around since photography was invented”,
and sure, people have manipulated images since the beginning of the craft, as I wrote earlier. Edward Steichen, a strong proponent of pictorialism (until he swung to modernism) wrote, in 1903, that “… every photograph is a fake from start to finish, a purely impersonal, unmanipulated photograph being practically impossible”. By it’s nature, all photography can only be a representation of some part of reality–nothing in the world is black and white, for instance–and, as Garry Winogrand said, “When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts”.
But regardless of image processing and treatments my feeling is that generative AI diminishes the essential truth contained in “I was here, I saw this, I felt something” and that diminished truth makes a picture something other than a photograph. For me, without that truth–created by the involvement of real light–it ceases to have much of any meaning, it is no longer a photograph, the human element is lost, and I feel a little cheated. It has become increasingly difficult to look at a “great” picture online and not have a nagging feeling of, “is this real?” These days we are forced to consider the source of an image before we can embrace some sense of veracity in what we are looking at.
As my friend John reminded me, the “A” in AI does stand for “artificial”, after all, and when has artificial implied much of any good5? Does anyone prefer artificial flowers over real ones? Or relaxing on astroturf instead of grass? How about the taste of aspartame over sugar? Does anyone prefer artifice over authenticity?6
In a photograph I want to get to know something of you, the photographer you, by seeing what you saw. I want to have an idea how you felt and what inspired you to lift your camera to your eye. I need that human connection in a photograph. It is what makes photography, to me, such a beautiful and important craft and art form.
So? What have you seen and felt and photographed recently?
🤢
In a photo encyclopedia, in my collection, it states that Niépce used a version of the word “photograph” in a letter to his brother, Claude, dated May 9th 1816. When I asked ChatGPT-4o mini about the origin of the word it replied with the 1839 answer. I asked about the French version of the word. It replied that it was around the same time.
Because of the encyclopedia entry I enquired further, “didn’t Niépce use the word before that?”
Yes, you are correct. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, one of the pioneers of photography, used the term “photographie” in correspondence as early as 1829, which predates the more widely recognized use of the term by Sir John Herschel in 1839 […] Thank you for pointing that out!
Me: Do you have details about the correspondence in 1829?
In 1829, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce corresponded with the French scientist and inventor Louis Daguerre regarding their mutual interest in capturing images. In this correspondence, Niépce used the term “photographie” to describe his work with light-sensitive materials and the process of creating images […]
Me: Do you have a accurate date for the 1829 letter?
Yes, the correspondence between Joseph Nicéphore Niépce and Louis Daguerre that included the use of the term “photographie” is dated to 1829, specifically on January 7, 1829. In this letter, Niépce discussed his experiments with light-sensitive materials and the process of capturing images, which he referred to as “photographie.” This letter is significant in the history of photography as it marks one of the early uses of the term in relation to the photographic process.
I looked at the two letters referenced, in the collection of the Maison Nicéphore Niépce, and could find no mention of any word containing “photo”.
I also currently use AI for mask-generation, and for noise removal, tools to work with the image I have.
Although I’m not likely to have any interest or emotional connection to it.
It should go without saying that artificial limbs, hearts and other lifesaving innovations are somewhat excepted.
It would be remiss of me not to mention that the word “artificial” comes from Latin roots, ‘ars’ meaning ‘skill’ and ‘-fex’ meaning to make, and so became the word for something manmade.
Very interesting piece. Thanks, Martin.