Fish-skin images and more
Welcome to the 80th edition of this newsletter!
With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If you want to support my work, you can sign up for my Patreon. This will get you access to exclusive material every week.
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Imagine you walk into your bathroom to find that all the toothpaste that you hadn't used before somehow had been squeezed out of the tube. What will you do?
If you're an ordinary person, you'll probably clean up the mess and try to find out how this could happen in the first place (your cat?).
If you're a member of photoland, you'll probably try to get the toothpaste back into the tube.
I'm obviously being a bit snarky here. Snark isn't a good look. I'm sorry.
But I can't help but feel that too many debates in the world of photography remind me of someone desperately trying to get toothpaste back into the tube or, if you prefer another mental image, having a long debate about a train that has long left the station.
The reality is that since its inception, photography has been subject to a huge number of drastic technological changes, many of which were at least somewhat contested by its practitioners.
In fact, photography itself started out being contested, with painter Charles Baudelaire having choice words about those using a camera ("the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies" -- lol what, dude?).
In a nutshell, you can either accept the reality of the often drastic technological changes, or, well, you don't. I personally find it a lot more interesting to look into the consequences of the technologies itself and, in particular, how it changes the way we engage with photographs.
This is in part because I have a background in astrophysics, where people don't think twice about constructing a photograph from data. Another reason for my interest probably also stems from my interest in language and the time I spent studying Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy of it. Unlike in his early -- Tractatus -- years, the later Wittgenstein argued that if you're too rigid about the rules of languages then you're not understanding how it's used and you're creating problems where in fact there aren't any.
It's now 2023. Yet again, photography has changed very dramatically with the introduction of computational photography, which probably is already part of your daily life. If you own a smartphone you might have wondered how those really small lenses are able to take all these pretty good looking pictures. The answer is simple: they actually aren't. There's software that helps out.
In 2022, Kyle Chayka argued in New Yorker magazine that Apple's latest phone have taken this approach too far. I'm not sure that I agree with that; but that doesn't really matter (I should note that I mostly don't use Apple's photo app; I use the Halide app).
We could argue over whether iPhone photographs are even real photographs, given that they're artificial. But most people happily use them (me included), and the argument feels a wee bit quaint to me. That toothpaste has long been squeezed out of the tube.
So do I wonder to what extent the photographs of late-afternoon skies that I have been taken of late are real photos or not? Not really.
But the world of photography likes it debates and discussions, in particular if somehow there's a controversy. By now, you might have heard about German artist Boris Eldagsen who submitted an AI photo to some award. The photograph then was picked as a winner, after which Elgadsen announced that he had tricked the organizers and that he was not accepting the award. Instead, he wants to have a discussion about AI photographs, which, according to him, are not photographs. This story blew up quickly, and mainstream outlets are now covering it.
My response to the whole thing and in particular to the "this is not photography" bit can mostly be summarized with the following emoji: 😑
To begin with, and in light of what I wrote earlier, there are quite a few things we should talk about when it comes to AI photographs. Whether or not they actually are photographs is the least interesting aspect (and by "least interesting" I mean: "absolutely not interesting at all").
Instead, we could talk about how the machines in the background use photographs made by other people. When you produce your own AI photo, you use other people's labour. Given that so many photographers struggle making money, maybe we should talk about this more.
Or maybe we should talk more about the role of artistic intent when it comes to making those images. Is refining one's prompts really so artistic? To me, that sounds more like the kind of knowledge you acquire in foundations classes at art schools.
Regardless, I also read a more detailed article about the whole affair, written by Tom Seymour for The Art Newspaper. According to a spokesperson of the award, the "judging panel was aware that Eldagsen’s image was AI-generated and awarded the prize in that knowledge". This particular part is worth quoting in full:
A spokesperson for the Sony World Photography Awards tells The Art Newspaper: “During our various exchanges with Boris Eldagsen ahead of announcing him as the Creative category winner in the Open competition on 14 March, he had confirmed the ‘co-creation’ of this image using AI. In our correspondence he explained how following ‘two decades of photography, my artistic focus has shifted more to exploring creative possibilities of AI generators’ and further emphasising the image heavily relies on his ‘wealth of photographic knowledge’. As per the rules of the competition, the photographers provide the warranties of their entry.
“The Creative category of the Open competition welcomes various experimental approaches to image making from cyanotypes and rayographs to cutting-edge digital practices.
Now we have two competing sides of the story.
Make of that what you will.
Meanwhile, here's Hito Steyrl on AI:
It’s a great PR move by the big corporations. The more people talk and obsess over it, the more the corporations profit. For me, these renderings—I call them “statistical renderings”—they are the NFTs of 2022, right?
In 2021, we had NFTs. In 2022, we have statistical renderings. [These companies] onboard people into new technological environments; with NFTs, people learned how to use crypto wallets, ledgers, and metamasks, and learn all this jargon. With the renderings, we have basically the same phenomenon.
They are onboarding tools into these huge cloud infrastructures that companies like Microsoft are now rolling out, backed by these large-scale computing facilities like Azure, for example. Companies try to establish some kind of quasi-monopoly over these services and try to draft people to basically buy into their services or become dependent on them. That’s the stage we’re at. The renderings are basically the sprinklings over the cake of technological dependency.
Speaking of labour, through Steffen Siegel's Instagram feed, I just came across a fascinating West German movie from 1978 (the version linked to here has English subtitles). The movie is set in West Berlin, and it includes a number of longer sequences in which the camera moves through the city. They're really fascinating.
The story itself is also interesting because it centres on a young woman photographer. There's a huge focus on her trying to make a living but also on trying to assert her female voice in a world dominated by men.
It's very much worth your time even as, I should add, the visuals are a bit depressing.
By now, I've seen a lot of photographs. It's pretty rare for me to be amazed by something. Usually when I see something, I try to research it to see whether it's actually real or manipulated. So when I saw a picture of a human limb covered in fish skin, I thought that that couldn't possibly be real.
But it is. Given that I don't know who squeamish you are, I'm not going to share the image here. Instead -- content warning: read on first before clicking -- I will link to an article from a medical journal entitled Innovative treatment using tilapia skin as a xenograft for partial thickness burns after a gunpowder explosion. The article contains medical images so if you're squeamish at all, please don't click on it. If you're not squeamish, go ahead.
Honestly, the image that's Figure 4 blew my mind in ways that none of the recent AI images have. My first inclination when seeing it was to think if was obviously fake. But it's real. The New York Times published something about this in 2022: Tasty Tilapia: Your Next Bandage? (That article does not contain medical images.)
Lastly, I'd like to share an article about Yayoi Kusama. If you're not familiar with the name, I'm sure you've seen or heard of at least some of her work, in particular her Infinity Rooms.
Will Gompertz wrote what would appear to be a part of a larger book. The article can serve as a really good introduction to this particular artist:
Yayoi Kusama is far from unique in using art as therapy to overcome extreme anxiety; fear is one of the most common sources of creative inspiration. But her psychological experiences are unique, as are yours and mine. They could have crushed her, but instead they were the making of her. She used them to see and be seen, and to become one of the most original, ground-breaking artists of our time. She says she was born into a family and a culture that suppressed emotions, but despite resistance from her parents and periods of ridicule during her career, she has prevailed by showing the world the healing power of confronting the thoughts that frightened her.
And that's it from me today. As always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg