What is the value of taking photographs in the age of AI? Why would someone spend thousands of hours hiking and taking pictures of the same trails over and over? What is the difference between an image and a photograph?
The answers to these questions are intertwined. To be sure a photograph is a type of image. But an image is not necessarily a photograph, even if it was made using a camera. To me a photograph is more than an image. A photograph is an image that is intimately tied to something I was experiencing at the moment I took it.
AI creates images, people take photographs. An AI powered robot that walks to a place and presses the shutter release on a camera is not taking a photograph, unless it can also convey to me something that resonates about an experience. The robot is creating an image. The same applies to pictures taken by people. If there is something about the image that conveys an experience to me, then it is a photograph. Otherwise it is an image that could have been generated using AI or some other method. By this definition images which I would consider to be photographs may well be nothing more than images to someone else, and vice versa.
My commentary on the images I post is an attempt to express my experience at that moment. I would not take photographs of the same subjects over and over if there were not unique and meaningful experiences associated with each one.
This is why I do not feel that AI is a threat to photography, and this is why I continue to practice photography in the age of AI.
The image at the top of this post was taken from a dune ridge looking down into a wetland area that is covered in a type of reed called a Phragmite. Phragmites are an invasive reed that completely takes over where ever it grows. Controlling it is challenging for the park restoration team and although it may look pretty, it is devastating for a healthy ecosystem. The photograph below shows a different part of the same wetland which has not been overrun by the Phragmites. These thoughts were running through my mind when I took both images, which makes them photographs to me.
