"Should we define a 'nonfiction photography' that excludes synthetic and highly manipulated images, and make it clear to the reader where the boundaries lie?"
This inquiry by @fredritchin in his recently published Synthetic Eye (Thames & Hudson, 2025) unleashes flurry of questions we should ask of photography's legacies and futures.
The idea spurred some thoughts for me:
1. It's interesting to invert the question to consider synthetic images as participants within photography's long heritage of fictional practices, which date back to the medium's earliest days. It could even be argued that fiction, fabrication, and theatrical allowance are even more fundamental to the photographer's instincts as picture-makers than documentary or pure-truth telling.
2. In firm agreement with Ritchin and others, AI tools post tremendous risks to the traditional credibility/belief we give over to images that appear to tell stories of the real world. This has serious implications we need to confront. There are no simple pathways to do so.
3. What remains true is that belief in the image's claims to truth relies more on caption, context, and authorial/institutional credibility than they do the contents of the image itself.
4. In the emergence of citizen journalism. the speed in which amateur news reports proliferate on social media poses incredible risks as credibility becomes nearly impossible to govern outside the walls of centralized institutions.
5. Regardless of what measures we're able to adopt to address this crisis of credibility (and Ritchin has excellent ideas), we should acknowledge that the mere existence of synthetic images drastically changes the conditions of our relationships to traditional photographs.
6. The most centralized location of discussion about AI and photography is the subreddit r/isthisAI, which has grown to over 3m people since May 2023. In it, which amateur sleuths determine if vernacular images are real or fake, and reflects widespread anxieties and uncertainties not over high-minded reportage pictures, but of more common picture currencies that are used as evidentiary claims in more personal/localized environments.
Your thoughts?
Photography's history is one of technological acceleration, mutability, and continual pursuit of efficiency in the medium's means of production.
For the entirety of its history, photographs have remained constant under the governance of photography's essential rules: light, time, optical mechanisms, ...these are the sources of gravity that have contained photography as a singular entity despite its numerous iterations.
AI's capacity for generating photographic work is not a break from photography, but an accelerant that pushes photography's language of appearances outside the medium's gravitational grounding, and into a new space with new rules, new vocabularies, and entirely new physics of being.
As I continue sharing my research publicly I'm being bombarded with comments that AI images aren't photographs. This is obvious, true, and not at all the argument that I'm making.
What is true and real is that generative AI is changing the future of photography, and I'm exploring the ways in which it is doing so.
Last night I spent a few hours creating a family tree of photography’s technological genealogy using ChatGPT Images 2.0.
It's not perfect by any means, but it turned out really well as a compression of the medium's 200-year evolution.
We start with the primordial elements of light and time, and end with near-autonomous picture-making machines.
The history of photography is a history of technology. But it is also a history of cultures using technology to extend our own faculties for seeing, making and remembering, and dreaming.
“Every society needs an image in its own likeness.”
This quote from the introduction to @joanfontcuberta_ ’s Pandora’s Camera (London: MACK, 2014) prompts us to ask a question:
If generative pictures reflect back to us the nature of our time and conditions, what kinds of images are we seeing ourselves in?
Here are a few that I’ve seen:
1. Images that allude to democratization via ease of access to generative systems and the evaporation of requirements in technical expertise. Yet generative images are both produced and distributed through infrastructures governed by a handful of corporate entities.
2. Images that no longer require an event to ground the rhetoric of persuasive evidence. In this, we see a reflection of political conditions in which plausibility passes for credibility, and where narrative cycles churn too quickly for collective scrutiny to take hold.
3. Images made from the compression of immense cultural memory. Textual and visual knowledge catalogued, tagged, uploaded, circulated, and absorbed into machine learning systems. They reveal a societal desire to use collective memory as raw material for collective futures.
4. Images in which creation is no longer a result of special labor. As the friction between idea and execution is reduced to near zero, cultural output relies more on judgement, direction, and predictive recognition of ideas that contain cultural potential. A reflection of the timeless capitalistic urge to achieve greater efficiencies within means of production.
5. Images that assert ideological positions. Fragmentations within social fabrics as varying belief systems fracture into smaller and more specialized competing definitions. AI outputs allow for vast propagation of competing realities, while social platforms offer arenas for evangelizing to take place.
6. Images that resemble processed culture. They are optimized, abundant, immediately satisfying, and modified far beyond recognition of their original ingredients. Like processed food, they are engineered for consumption, but their origins become difficult to trace, and their value increasingly difficult to measure.
What do you think?
The history of photography is a history of technology.
This is the premise necessary to begin understanding generative AI and its implications for photography.
This account will be used as a public research notebook, examining the ways generative AI extends, unsettles, and accelerates photography’s technological inheritance.
Photography has never been a fixed medium. It has always evolved through new apparatuses, new efficiencies, new forms of automation, and new relationships between image, world, author, and viewer.
Generative AI does not arrive from outside this history. It arrives as the next stage in photography’s long evolutionary curve.
It pressures photography’s oldest questions: truth, fiction, labor, authorship, evidence, realism, fantasy, and the desire to make images beyond the limits of the hand.
Escape Velocity is a developing book project on generative AI, photography, and the future of image culture. These research notes are fragments of that larger inquiry.
This account will share research notes, writing excerpts, quotes, and, eventually, artists whose work represents the opening salvo of photographic possibility in this emergent era.
Follow along
