“ If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.”
-Morpheus.
With all this hype around AI and synthetic images, as “it” calls it, Metaverse, enhancing beauty filters in some social media platforms, and non-fungible tokens, I tend to agree with a statement that I heard the other day.
“We are in the middle of a war between reality and the virtual”
I really don’t know if we are at war; that word seems a little bit too over the top. But I do think that somehow we are in some kind of "decisive moment".
I remember a similar conversation when digital cameras started to popularize. Is this the death of real photography? Photographers are going to lose their jobs, etc. Although I do think that all this concept of getting the newer thing as fast as you can got a little bit out of hand, my opinion is that things evolved, the profession, the way we tell stories... Some people did not catch up with the change, but in general, I think that everybody got used to this new technology. Regarding the last wave of visual technology though, I think that there is a difference, not only because of the technology itself but because of what people can do with it.
What is real? Morpheus asked Neo, and here I think lies the real problem. One of the great advantages of photography over other mediums of communication is that the photographer has to be there to do it. That statement implies several things. Being there means that you made the effort of going, you endured the risks, the investment, not only the monetary one, but also the psychological. Also, it means that somehow your photography is honest and close to reality because you lived the experience that you are translating to the viewer through your pictures.
It doesn’t matter if your style is more abstract or more journalistic; the lived experience is what gives real value to a body of work that you develop.
On the other hand, sometimes it feels like we are in some kind of game where it seems that you just want to “unlock the next level” as fast as you can, and if there is a trick that you can use to skip the challenge, the better. In my opinion, one example would be the famous NFTs. Call me old-fashioned, but I think that they are nonsense. It’s a game of speculation and a trend of being in the latest thing without adding any real value, not because it is in digital form but because the point is to do whatever you can to convince whoever buys these things (usually other NFT creators) except the most important part, which is to say something with it.
Photography is a language, especially our kind of photography, where we have an emitter, a message, a receptor, and a code to decipher that message. And the key part here is actually the message. That’s the point of communication, and if we lose that, we lose what makes it real.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to make money with your photography, of course. But I think that often we mistake the business with the language.
There are plenty of videos online about how to make money as a photographer, how to grow subscribers or followers, how to brand yourself, but it seems that no one talks about how to do good photography, and I think that is where we have to start.
Artificial intelligence.
Like any other new technology, it has its benefits and its problems.
As you know, I’m Spanish, therefore my first language is, of course, Spanish. Even though I’m able to write in English, it's not a surprise for anyone that I used to have to check again and again the grammar and the spelling of my articles. Moreover, I had to send it to someone else (Christelle and Mei) to make sure that even after my efforts, it is properly written. Now I use AI. I write my text, and when it’s finished, I go to CHAT GPT and ask it to correct spelling and grammar. Boom! There you go, hours saved, and a certain degree of freedom achieved I would say. But I think that there is a great difference between doing that and just asking it to generate an article related to photography every week. I believe that the beauty of these letters to you and my opinions is that they are personal and honest. Because of that, your response is always amazing (thank you, by the way). We are communicating, and it’s real.
I think that with text, it is somehow easier to see the difference between real and virtual. AI can’t talk about personal experiences; it can only fake it, perhaps, but it feels funny. But what about synthetic images, as "it" calls it? Well, I believe that that’s trickier, maybe not yet, but it will achieve a level of realism that will damage commercial photography, for example. But advertisement never was really about reality to start with, and even if I’m sympathetic with commercial photographers (which, of course, I am), I think that the biggest problem is going to be regarding the truthfulness of photography. It’s already muddying the waters, and frankly, I'm not sure how that can stop.
Funny enough, asking Chat GPT itself how we could fight this "war" between the real and the unreal related to reality-based photography (street, documentary travel...), it told me that film photography could be a solution, which is true on paper, but that’s expensive, and not everyone can afford it or has the time. And if there is something that I like about digital photography, is that it opened this tradition of telling stories through images to everyone, and that’s good.
I think that we, the authors, should approach this whole thing from an educational angle. Maybe we have to stress the idea that our task is not only to capture beauty but also reality and share that process with everyone we can.
Explaining ourselves is going to be a big part of our routine in the future, and actually, that can be something good that we can get from this "war." Maybe winning means a deeper understanding of what we do; from our friends, families, audiences, and maybe because of that, the "real world" is going to be of real value, not only in photography but in many other areas of our society.
Maybe i'm being optimistic like my friend Micah Green but I think that like everything else, this can be an opportunity for the better. The future will tell. In the meantime, I’m going to finish this letter with the words of Brutus written by Shakespeare for Julius Caesar.
“There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.”
