It's Not About the Camera
AI doesn't change the artistic balance between humans and our tools.
“Wow, that’s a cool image. What camera do you use?” Photographers get that question a lot. But as they know, it’s not about the camera.
Art lies not in the equipment but in how you use it: choosing aperture, shutter speed, and ISO depending on conditions; the story you’re trying to tell; the style you want to create. Lighting, timing, and taste. Bokeh. Blur. Mood. That’s the art of photography.
Art lies in editing. I took 2,000 to 4,000 images at each wedding I shot professionally. Each batch took days to reduce to the few hundred I loved.
Art lies in ideas. For example, I got these eight images of Jenna. I thought: why not arrange them in a collage?
Art lies in instinct, choices, style, editing, and ideas; it’s not about the camera.
The Art of AI
“Wow, that’s a cool image. Did you use AI? What tool did you use?”
Like photography, using AI isn’t about the equipment. I prefer Midjourney, but I switch it up depending on my goal, like changing lenses on a camera.
The art of AI lies in editing. Like batches of images from a wedding, most AI-generated images are bland, boring, or fake-feeling, but a few excite me. For example, do you like this image? Midjourney generated it.
Or did it?
The art of AI lies in ideas and choices. This image took four weeks to “make.” First, I had the idea for this article. As I wrote, I generated hundreds of images of cameras and the sun. I picked a few I liked and set them aside. I tried dozens of color schemes inspired by my favorite painters from the 1960s and decided on a mid-century modernist feel. I whittled my favorites to five and chose the two in this post.
The art of AI lies in risk-taking. I like my images, but you might hate them. It’s scary to take a stand. But, as Seth Godin says in What is Your Art, it’s one of the most generous things you can do.
Like a camera, AI is equipment. The art is something else.
The Not-So-Proud Tradition of Uninformed Critique
At the dawn of photography in the 1800s, some, like Edgar Allen Poe, hailed it “the most extraordinary triumph of modern science.”1 Others disqualified photography as art due to its mechanical nature, like Lady Elizabeth Eastlake.2
Poet Charles Baudelaire was poetically viscous: “Our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on the metallic plate. A form of lunacy, an extraordinary fanaticism took hold of these new sun-worshippers.”3
"Photography is for lunatics and fanatical sun-worshippers” — wow!
Baudelaire doubled down: “If photography is allowed to deputize some of art’s activities, it will not be long before it has supplanted or corrupted art altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the masses, its natural ally.”4
The naysayers of 1800 sound like the critics of today, like the response to Michael Woudenberg’s post, AI Is[n’t] Killing Artists:
Critics like Eastlake, Baudelaire, and de Vitry mistake tools for artistic expression. Moreover, it’s doubtful they even tried the tools they denigrate. It’s better to listen to Poe.
Or David Hockney. Hockney, regarded as one the most influential artists of the 20th century, began drawing on the iPhone with his thumb in 2009 at the age of 72. His exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020, was created entirely on the iPad with the app “Brushes.”
The Result of AI Cannot Remotely Be Seen
200 years ago, Poe said of photography, “Its result cannot, even remotely, be seen.” Similarly, AI’s result cannot, even remotely, be seen. AI is a new and powerful tool, but art still lies in courage, effort, and the generosity of those that wield it like fanatical, lunatic sun-worshippers.
To start with AI, read How to Beat AI Thinkism, Part 2, or The Joy of Generative AI Cocreation on
.And check out these other Substacks I love:
The Road to AI We Can TrustbyGary Marcus
byThe Intrinsic Perspective by Erik Hoel
The Pragmatic EngineerbyGergely Orosz
And check out my new podcast, sponsored by Correlation One, Data Humanized.
Poe, Edgar Allen. “The Daguerreotype.” Edited by Alan Trachtenberg. Classic Essays on Photography. New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980.
Rosenblum, Naomi. A World History of Photography. New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 1997
Baudelaire, Charles. “The Daguerreotype.” Edited by Alan Trachtenberg. Classic Essays on Photography. New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980.
https://otherreality.wordpress.com/2008/10/06/social-reaction-to-photography/
Emerson was quite enamored of early photography because light was the painter. He wrote that photography represented "the true republican style of painting. The Artist stands aside and lets you paint yourself."
Wonderful essay. Whether photography or the loom we've worried about technology. But in worrying about technology we've failed to see what makes us unique.
Those that do art mechanistically are at threat. Those who not understand what they do and how will always be fearful.