AI-Generated Imagery Vs. Photoshopped Photography: What’s the Difference?
I worry that a backlash against AI-generated imagery will call digital art photography into question.
Any nimrod can make an AI-generated image. You get an image-generating app. You type in what you want — an act that makes you a “prompt creator” but not the creator of a new image.
What the AI-image generator spits out is a pastiche of elements “scraped” — i.e., stolen — or from the work of trained and talented artists.
Why do I think this is important to digital photographers?
A Minnesota art gallery owner, initially impressed with my samples, later turned me down because, he said, he didn’t want “computer-enhanced photography.”
If AI-generated imagery gets a bad name — and it’s doing so — I worry that it may throw digital photography back into an old controversy — one that has bedeviled photographers and editors since the invention of photography nearly two centuries ago:
Is photography really an art? Don’t photographers just screw with mechanical and digital devices and software?
That question points toward a general understanding of what photography is — some representation of a person, place, thing or event that exists or has existed in our shared reality, reproduced by a mechanical device called a camera. The understanding that photography reproduces some version of the way reality looks is a pact between photographer and viewer. The photographer implies, that yes, she really saw this and it looked like this, with allowances made for artistic license.
It takes no talent, skill, or training to make an AI-generated image. It takes skill, imagination, and knowledge of art and photography to effectively edit a photo.
“Female Figure on a Staircase.”
This is a photo I took on an IPhone 14 Pro as I was walking through the Skywalk in Duluth, Minnesota on a grey day last March. I’d reached the part where it passes through the city’s old Board of Trade Building, which dates from the early 20th century.
I saw the person walk down the stairway, top left. I knew in a second that it would be a good shot.
I took the picture in color. The camera, like the majority of digital cameras, doesn’t produce black and white, though mine does show a rather poor-quality version of what a shot will look like in black and white.
To get from color to this, I first had to decide whether it’s an effective black and white shot. Doesn’t take much to do that — just art classes I started at age 15, learning to draw the human figure, learning what an effective composition is, making photos with film cameras, plus 12 years of work in digital landscape photography, before I began moving into full-on Expressionist photography about a year ago.
But none of that could replace the time I have spent studying the work of great photographers, admiring the journalistic, full-color photography in National Geographic alongside the work of serious art photographers of the twentieth century, most of whom worked in black-and-white.
You can’t sing an aria from Tosca without listening to opera. A lot of opera.
That visual background taught me that the shot would have a strong enough composition and enough contrast to make a dramatic black-and-white picture.
This picture was produced with the help of a machine, like every photograph ever made. No machine would know when to stop twiddling when I knew I got the exposures right.
No machine could find that this image invokes childhood memories of buildings like this, or scenes from Film Noir.
No machine can walk around its environment, seeing things that invoke states of feeling or memory or desire or disgust, and compose effective shots in an instant.
And no machine could decide that of the tens of thousands of images I have produced, many of which I have tossed, this one is worth saving and worth the work, not because it’s great or because it’s perfect, but because it grabs your eye, holds it for a bit, and lets you know that if you stop a minute, the mundane world you inhabit is far more interesting than you often assume.
I do that. Not everybody can. No machine can.
Notes:
You can find my most recent photography on my Facebook page, Red Riot Images. https://www.facebook.com/lauramarlandphotography/
My older work is on my website. https://www.lauramarlandphotography.com/
