“Is this what the camera saw?”
Anonymous
It wasn’t all that long ago that I was showing my work (and hopefully selling a piece or two) at a street fair. Most people that came into my booth were appreciative of what I had created. But one couple walked in, looked critically at my photographs and turned to me and asked, “Is this what the camera saw?”
Digital photography has facilitated an explosion in expressive photographs. But I get ahead of myself.
Back in the mid-19th century when photography was invented it was not within the reach of any but the most committed of practitioners. Making a photograph required the ability to make your own light-sensitive glass plates that were to become your negatives. This required a knowledge of the chemistry that made photography possible and portable darkrooms that could be taken into the field. Next came the exposure and development of the plate, again requiring a knowledge of chemistry. The exposure and development of the print required even more chemistry. It’s no wonder that only a few people went to the effort to learn and master these techniques.
But the photographer was in complete control of the final product, the print. They could make adjustments to the emulsion and exposure of the plate (and eventually black and white film) and its subsequent development, in this way implementing decisions they had made on how best to render the subject. The same is true of the printing process where not only the choice of paper but dodging and burning during the exposure and the use of various development techniques helped to achieve the photographer’s intent.
All this control led to photographs that were not mere objective representations of the subject but went beyond that to reveal the subjective intent and sensibilities of the photographer.
Then, in 1935 Eastman Kodak introduced color film. Processing color film was so complex and with no latitude for deviation that it had to be done in Kodak’s laboratories. Even later developments in color film, both negative and positive, that simplified the process making it available to labs other than Kodak, required such strict control of conditions that deviation to achieve a special effect was virtually impossible. The simplified process made it possible for a few photographers to develop their own film and make their own prints, but the parameters were so stringent that they had little or no control over the final result other than choosing the film that they thought would best render their subject. But the typical photographer, no matter how committed, had to rely on labs to do the development and printing.
Then came the digital revolution.
Kiosks appeared in drug stores that offered lab services. You could bring you memory card and upload your images which would be printed by a lab and you would receive 4X6” prints in the mail in a couple of days.
But for the committed photographers, the digital revolution put control of the final photograph back into their hands. If you had a computer, you could purchase software such as Photoshop that would convert your raw files into printable formats such as TIFF. But more importantly, now the photographer regained control of such qualities as tonality, contrast, color, saturation, texture and the like, more control than was ever possible in the black and white world. Now the photographer had the ability to go beyond factual representation and convey through the photograph feelings, emotions, thoughts, impressions and all the subjective qualities that go into making an expressive photograph. Now the photographer could go beyond aesthetics and actually create art.
So, in answer to the gentleman that asked if my photographs were what the camera saw, my answer was simple. “No, they are what I saw.” They left in a huff.
There is a powerful force that is gaining momentum in the field of photography. That force is Artificial Intelligence or AI. There is some misunderstanding as to what AI encompasses so let me provide this definition.
Artificial Intelligence is the process of training a computer to produce results, not based on what the programmer has created in a fixed set of rules of logic that do not change, but by creating programs that ‘learn’ on their own. They are trained by, in the case of photography, exposing them to millions of images that are considered to be of high quality, the types of images that one would find desirable. It is called ‘Machine Learning.’
A great deal of effort is underway to incorporate AI into our cameras. It is already implemented in smart phone cameras and Arsenal is a product under development targeting DSLRs and mirrorless cameras.
But it is also being incorporated into photo apps for iPads and smart phones and even into Lightroom and Photoshop.
One must ask the question, “If AI can produce an aesthetically pleasing photograph with the push of a button, what does that do to the notion of photography as an art medium?” One definition of art that is helpful here is that it is ‘an object or experience that is consciously produce….’ This would eliminate by definition anything produced solely through AI because computers are not conscious beings.
But more importantly, if AI becomes the means by which photographs are produced then the influence of the photographer is once again diminished. No longer is the photograph a conscious expression of the photographer’s personality, view of the world, emotions, thoughts and all the things that make the photograph unique to that person. The process becomes similar to the days of color film where the process, in this case the AI trained algorithms, decide what is a good photograph.
Lightroom has incorporated AI behind the Auto button. It is a distinct improvement over the old Auto button. Sometimes it’s quite close but other times it’s way off the mark. If it is used, it is best used as a starting point. In my experience, it has never produced an image that I considered to be the final product.
Photography can be an expressive medium that shares the insights, feelings and thoughts of the photographer, not a mere visual replication of the world. I will never give in to automation to produce my photographs no matter how intelligent it may be. They will always be an attempt to share with the viewer what I saw.
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