I want to try something a little different here. To start, I have a question for you, and I’m inviting you to reply back to this letter if you have thoughts you’d like to share.

What I want to know is this: how much do you trust the pictures you see? Do you look at everything with a wary eye, or, if you see something that looks like a photograph, do you register it as evidentiary? Are you somewhere in between? Do you think about the context that you see the picture in? Is this something you even think about or does the notion feel burdensome? I’d love to know how you think about this.

For almost two years now I’ve jotted down ideas about the implications of generative AI imaging for photography as a medium, but all of this thinking in a vacuum has me wondering what I might be missing.

In a sense, I’ve used AI or algorithms to manipulate my photographs almost since I started making pictures - yet I consider myself loyal to the notion of documentary photography. I feel like there is, if not a claim to truth in my pictures, a claim to a record. There’s not really good language here - and photographers have argued about it since the first pictures were made - but if I were cornered I would say that my pictures are non-fiction. That’s an admittedly tough notion to defend, but try to defend it I would.

In 2017 I started making work that utilized Photoshop’s new image blending algorithms that were intended to help combine multiple digital pictures together into one coherent image.

The idea was that you would take a few photographs of something - let’s say a mountain with the sun setting behind it - perhaps one picture biased towards better representation of the tones and textures of the mountain and one picture biased towards a more accurate capture of the color of the sunset - and then combine these into a more complete singular picture. The result of this technology was often widely and rightly recognized as an image that looked like something beyond real; light and shadow almost eliminated for the sake of garish representations of texture or color.

While it could be used to accurately depict the scene photographed, this technology seemed like a slippery slope to me. I started feeding the algorithm wildly different photographs from the same general scenes to see how it reconciled them. The result was often an irresolvable visual mess, but sometimes a digital collage emerged that struck me as a unique representation all its own - one that had a structured composition, but with pixellated and incoherent edges and mask lines to leave visual evidence of the process that was used.

I wanted to make pictures that at first glance might look enough like a photograph, but would quickly reveal themselves as an aberration of sorts. If the picture looked too much like a photograph I was risking deception, and that was not my interest. I wanted to, through the digital flaws that emerged, reveal the artificial nature of the process in making the pictures. I controlled the photographs I made and which ones I fed into the Photoshop functions, but I had to embrace the software’s decisions. (I’ll concede here that seeing these pictures smaller on a screen might in fact be deceiving, but the larger prints revealed the real nature of the work much more clearly).

For a successful example of (I think) using this technology to more controlled ends, I would point interested viewers to the art of Laura Plageman. Her digital collages and her choice of blending modes reveal the nature of the process of combining multiple images, but her compositions look to be more intentional and controlled as well. I can’t say for sure whether or not she used the same technique, but it looks quite familiar (only in the technical sense, I think her subject matter and execution are quite different).

While I was doing this work I felt like I was trying to find my own visual language to get at the fallibility of photography in the digital age, to make work that revealed photographic veracity to be a mirage. But in the following years this technology has grown by leaps and bounds such that the visual signatures of manipulation have become so much more subtle, invisible to most. A smartphone picture is quite unlikely to be a photograph in any true sense anymore - the blending of images is inherent to the creation of the picture - automatic in so many situations. To take one example, the reason the iPhone camera seems to get better with every generation is, in large part, because the software that automatically embellishes the picture gets stronger. Whatever pictures you may have on your phone, it gets harder and harder to accurately call them photographs.

What I am trying to wrap my ahead around are the implications for this shift. Some readers will rightly point out that photographs have been manipulated since they were first made. They were never an accurate facsimile of the physical world. This is true - and yet the degree and scale of change now is different. It used to be expensive for an advertiser to create a picture that lied to you about how people looked. Now, it is de rigueur and essential for anyone with an incentive to sell the best version of their life on social media. Now, we are seeing a world that looks like photography, but increasingly is not. We are, more and more, looking at a warped reflection in the mirror. How does that affect how we consider our own lives?

I will leave you with that for now. Admittedly incomplete thoughts and almost all questions and no answers, but it’s a conversation I am interested in engaging in more and more. For me, as a photographer, these discussions are not just academic. They have huge implications. The technological shift continues to change how I view the mission of my own work. If you feel compelled to let me know you feel about today’s visual landscape, please write back.

Thanks always for your time.