Photography in the age of AI

I remember when digital photography was a new thing.

I was working for the University of Colorado as a student employee in their photography office. My job was to digitize, touch up, and archive the images shot by the university's photographers. My days were spent scanning slides and negatives; fine-tuning the exposure and removing unwanted artifacts via Photoshop; and saving the images to a handful of external HDs. This was fairly cutting-edge at the time.

I was just starting to get into photography, and was especially attracted to the work of Ansel Adams and the f/64 artists of the early 20th century. Landscape photography became my jam – grand sweeping vistas and intimate details of nature became my muses.

That summer, a couple of new cameras arrived in the office – a pair of Nikkon D1s. At the time, there was a lot of hand-wringing among professionals what digital photography would mean for their field. There was a sense at that time – especially among the old guard – that serious image-making involved working with film, and that the quality of digital cameras would ever only be good enough for hobbyists.

They were wrong, of course. While the resolution of the D1 left a lot to be desired, it wasn't long before newer and better DSLR models replaced the SLRs of old. Image sensors and resolution got better.

Then, Apple paired a digital camera with a mobile phone and put a camera in everyone’s hand. Instagram gave people filters, and a community based around digital images. Drones made aerial image-making accessible to everyone. Suddenly, photography was everywhere, and everyone has become a photographer.

The landscape has shifted dramatically over the last 25 years. But the power of the image, and of great image-making, remains. People are just as infatuated with beautiful, captivating, challenging and evocative images today as they were when a medium-format Hasselblad was the tool of choice for serious image makers.

And those old methods haven’t completely died off, either. There are still people shooting with vintage medium-format cameras and communities that fetishize Kodachrome film and Ilford paper. Film-based photography exists in a sort of hipster twilight era, much like vinyl records.

This brings me to AI. I expect generative AI to have a far more profound impact on the photographic arts than any of the things I mentioned above. Image-making will be a very different process, and the results will be weird, unsettling and inspiring – all at once. Sooner or later, the act of going to a place, camera in hand, to take a picture, will become an anachronism. This will be especially true for the kinds of pictures I love, the ones of sweeping vistas and natural details.

This is the essence of progress. There will be many people who claim that conventional photography is better in some way – more real or more natural or more authentic, perhaps. And there are certainly some very serious present-day concerns about the ability of professionals to monetize their work in the AI era. But – from an aesthetic perspective at least – there is nothing inherently better or worse than AI-generated imagery. A great image is a great image, regardless of whence it originated.

In many ways, I foresee AI expanding people’s creative horizons, just as digital photography did. Instead of simply admiring a compelling picture, you can create one. What AI lacks in verisimilitude it more than makes up for in democratization. Putting creative means in more people’s hands is a net positive thing, in my view.

As for me, I’ll continue to take pictures with a camera. I’ll certainly make images with AI, too – but conventional photography, the kind of image-making that involves going outside, feeling the sun or wind or rain, treading through the brush, and framing a vista with your own eye, will continue to be a rewarding, life-affirming experience for me.

It’s a lot more difficult, sure. But negotiating with that difficulty is a helpful reminder of what it means to be connected to the real world. And, perhaps most importantly – I simply enjoy it.

- March 16, 2025