Photography is having an identity crisis.
The public release of generative AI image tools like DALL·E and Midjourney in the summer of 2022 started a Big Tech arms race to see who can cram the most AI photo editing features into their software as possible. Google's ads for its new Pixel 8 are showing how its AI engine lets you superimpose smiles onto people who may not have been looking at the camera. Zuckerberg and Co just showcased new "Backdrop" and "Restyle" features for Instagram that let you make AI overhauls to your photos using basic text queries. Samsung blew the minds of smartphone photographers earlier this year by showing how the Galaxy S23 Ultra can take professional-quality photos of the moon, only for it later to be revealed that the phone is just using AI software tricks to automatically cut and paste a professional photo of the moon onto the user's photo whenever it recognizes the moon in a shot.
Long story short, AI photo editing has gone mainstream, and moon photos will never be the same.
My first reaction to all of this is I'm disappointed at how bone dry all the demos for these tools have been so far. Meta had months if not years to think of an ultra-unique way to show creators how powerful Instagram will be when you inject it with the limitless potential of AI, and the best thing they came up with was showing people how sick their baby would look in a crocheted swaddle rather than a cloth swaddle. Meta once again proving that nobody can give a keynote sex appeal like the Zucks.
But my second reaction is, "If we're using AI to alter all our photos so they no longer show what actually happened, then what even is a photo anymore?" Let's pretend you just took a photo on your Pixel 8 (yes, I know it's hard, but pretend you have a Pixel 8) of your partner and your 10-month-old baby in front of the Eiffel Tower on a cloudy summer day. That memory is now saved as a photo forever. But let's pretend on the flight back from Paris you dive into the photo editing tools and change the sky from cloudy to blue and you remove all the selfie stick-wielding tourists from the foreground and, to top it off, you change your baby's clothes so they're all crocheted. That photo is now showing a moment that never actually happened. So...is it still a photo?
I've thought about it enough that I can now confidently say yes. Yes it is. And this is why.
All cameras by definition do not capture reality. They capture what we instruct them to capture. Back when everyone used film cameras, this "instructing" was done by picking the shutter speed and the f-stop and the focus and the film ISO rating, all of which impacted how the final photo looked. With an iPhone camera, virtually all of this "instructing" is done automatically with software, but that software is still choosing a shutter speed and an f-stop and a focus and is often taking multiple images at once at different exposures and combining them into one master image and automatically adding saturation and contrast and lighting adjustments...
Basically what I'm saying is never in the history of photography has a camera ever perfectly captured reality, whether you caption it as "No filter" or not. That's a fallacy. Cameras inherently shape reality.
Professional photographers understand this and have long turned this flaw into a feature. Ansel Adams, the only photographer to ever exist according to most Americans, famously leaned into this for his photo Monolith, the Face of Half Dome by purposely choosing camera settings that warped the scene to his artistic vision. More specifically, he put a dark red filter over his camera lens, which basically took the bright blue sky and turned it this deep, moody black color that made the snowy base and granite face of Half Dome pop out and feel even more indomitable. He did this because he didn't want to capture exactly what Half Dome was as much as he wanted to capture what it felt like.
And that's been the charter for professional photographers ever since. Unless you're a journalist or a photorealist, you're not opening up Adobe Lightroom to try and replicate what you saw with your eyes. You're opening up Adobe Lightroom to replicate what you felt in your soul. That's photography.
And who's to say that's less real? Who's to say what your eyes saw is more real than what your soul felt? A single moment in time is gone in the blink of an eye, and from that blink onwards, the memory of what your eyes saw is constantly deteriorating. You'll forget what color everyone was wearing and exactly what direction everyone was looking and exactly what facial expression everyone had and exactly how everyone was posed at that exact moment in time. You probably never really remembered it properly in the first place.
But feelings...feelings last. Feelings linger. We relive memories more with our guts than our eyes. Ask me about any moment from 5 years ago and the odds I can stage an exact scene for you are slim to none. But I can probably write you a pretty solid paragraph about how it felt. It's why we're always so disappointed that sunset photos don't "do it justice." It just doesn't feel the same.
And that's why when I see AI photo editing tools coming along like the ones I mentioned above, I really don't have a problem with them. Because if you're making a drastic overhaul to a scene — taking a photo of you standing in front of your house, and using AI so you're standing in front of the Eiffel Tower — then that's creating a net-new piece of art that no reasonable person would ever interpret as you preserving a memory. But if you're making the sort of on-the-go edits these ads usually suggest — changing everyone's face so they're smiling, removing strangers lingering in the backdrop, digitally improving how clear the moon looks in your photos, maybe even something crazy like changing your baby swaddle from cloth to crochet — then you're probably just matching the photo to how the memory feels. And to me, that's the more accurate version of the photo.
So what is a photo? Exactly what it was before these tools came out: a preserved version of what reality may have looked like and probably felt like.
At some point in that moment, everyone was smiling, and that's not less true just because someone wasn't at the exact moment you released the shutter.
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