Member-only story
Featured
In Praise of Serendipitous Creations
Could accidental images be the most important of all?
Are you lamenting the encroachments of artificial intelligence (AI) into photography today? For many creatives, generative AI is a merciless assassin of beauty and art, more cruel than photography was to 19th-century aesthetes. Yet, few are surprised today that photography failed to annihilate human creativity. Instead, it challenged the very conception of beauty and transfigured aesthetic approaches to form, calling the content of art to duel with the demons lurking in obscure shadows. Was it indeed for the better?
Photography still makes us stop before an image and defy its emotional pull, forcing us to think, not just feel and understand what it means to capture an experience. It gave us innovation in plastic arts, moved the artistic edge away from illustration and figurative representation toward abstraction and searched for new ways of seeing. Could cubism emerge without multiple-exposure photography? Would Rothko’s colour fields have a different audience reception without the invention of the Kodachrome?
