photography in the age of AI
the analog renaissance / a resistance against ai slop
i can’t be the only one feeling this way.
every time i open my phone, i feel like one of those facebook moms that’s fooled into watching one of those 3 minute cartoon cat videos and scrolling for another.
ai digital slop, they’re calling it. according to Wikipedia, "AI slop", often simply "slop", is a term for low-quality media, including writing and images, made using generative artificial intelligence technology.
ai has been normalized in our lives to a certain degree now, where we use it without a second thought to craft emails, organize trips, research articles for us. while the advantages are undeniable in certain contexts, it also feels… icky.
what happened to turning off our phones, and having a good think?
why is it increasingly easier to scroll mindlessly after work, instead of doing what we love— art, listening to music, hanging out with friends, anything but bed rotting?
with photography, ai has changed the game.
why even go out and take images, when ai can do it better? when you can generate the exact image you’re wishing that you could take, without leaving your house?
why shoot film, if ai can make digital images look analog?
why painstakingly hand-edit your client’s photos, when ai could learn your editing style and make presets from your work? there’s now AI programs for culling, batch color editing, one click skin retouching, client communication emails. many of the professional photography podcasts i listen to advertise constantly for these programs, like you’re a step behind and not “optimizing your business” correctly if you don’t let AI cull and edit your work.
*mini disclaimer / run your business and use ai however you want to, it is completely your own. i am not here to judge and this is just my humble opinion:~)
but it can safely be said that making a creative process more “efficient” is not the same thing as making it better (The Work Of Art in The Age of Digital Reproduction).
yet how is my role, as a photographer, being changed by this technology?
a camera for an analog life / polaroid
i was inspired the other day, walking in nyc and looking around at the wheat paste advertisements around the neighborhood.
polaroid’s new ad caught my eye— “The Camera For An Analog Life” campaign.
despite the tech industry’s breakneck pace to build data centers, suck up all our freshwater resources and AI-ify our lives, many of us feel like we need less technology, not more.
beneath the dream of robot cleaners and ai utopia lies a far more sinister path; an unyielding drive toward ever more efficient production and knowledge generation at lower costs. the same capitalistic drive that has powered western society for many generations, dictating how we approach this technology.
so how do we reckon with this ballooning ai bubble, especially within the photography community?
i’ve always been a fan of polaroid; since it’s founding nearly 100 years ago, it was the first to use a unique film and development process that allowed users to produce a finished print in just 60 seconds.
this was a revolutionary concept in photography’s history, and fundamentally changed how people took and shared photographs, both then and now.
and as a film photographer, the slowness of analog has always been one of my favorite parts of the process.
even with polaroid, where you can see the photo in a minute or two, it takes time to digitally scan the photos at home and study the emulsion’s colors. it’s analog in one of photography’s purest “modern” forms (the last century or so).
and despite it’s speed in development, polaroid is still film photography— it’s a chemical process that has allows the tiiiny little dye particles in a physical film print to change once it hits light.
It captures the humanness in all of us, wrinkles and all, and reminds us that the best of life happens in the real, physical world.
Patricia Varella, Brand and Creative Director at Polaroid
polaroid photos are essentially self-processing slide film, without the need for a projector or light table. the processing chemicals are present in the film itself, along with a reagent used to initiate the processing. the film is then ejected via rollers, which spreads the reagent throughout the film, starting processing (Analogue Wonderland).
with ai infiltrating so many aspects of life, i feel that we’ve been gravitating more towards the tangible. i used to be scared of all that ai could take away (clients, photographic progress, stability, sense of self worth, artistic ownership, the scary list goes on and on)—
but yet i am reminded, if i look to the past;
the close connection between art and human consciousness is older than civilization itself. early cave paintings, victorian oil portraits, photographers and their self portraits, all exclaiming “i was here, i was here.” all our ancestors clamoring to make their mark in the world, through whatever medium was calling or available to them at the time.
so it doesn’t matter if the art i made was bad, or messy, or took a really long time. it’s all part of the process, and true art is that very process of creation.
ai can’t generate your artistic progress
i recently have been going through allllll of my old photographs (i completely redid my website this summer! take a look here if you would to peruse), which has been both extremely rewarding and slightly frustrating at the same time.
why did i edit with such high contrast?? did i not think to photoshop this giant garbage can in the background out? i should’ve made a mask on my subject. oh damn, an entire film roll overexposed…
looking back at old work is truly humbling, for you’re revisiting all your old mistakes and brushing shoulders with the past artist that was.
as i went through my favorite photos, i had an urge to do something more with them. something besides putting them up on my website and letting them sit in my portfolio (although i did make a brand new section for personal work in my website!)
it gave me the perfect opportunity for a personal project, inspired by the polaroid campaign.
living my analog life (inspired by polaroid)
one of my goals this year is not only to make new images, but preserve the images that are important to me, made before my time.
these are the images that are familiar to us: grandpas on their boxy film cameras with absurdly large lenses, when you got a mandatory box of 4x6 prints with every roll, when digital cameras were a luxury that were just being rolled out to the general public.
i flew back to Seattle a few days ago, to document a lovely fall wedding weekend. while i’m back home, i immediately dug out the old film albums to begin the diligent task of carefully scanning + coloring all of them.
most of these were taken on a old nikon f60, not an expensive camera by any means, but yielding some incredibly sharp and beautiful images. it meters well, easy to load + has auto rewind, and most importantly, is very accessible to the average analog shooter.
this is the type of camera that was prevalent in most households to document everyday life— children growing up, parents growing up.
the images remind me of a different time, an analog life.
these images have never been scanned into the digital world before. i wanted to sit with them for a bit longer, letting whatever i felt come to the surface.
i also wanted to challenge myself to write a bit; captioning photos has always been a writing exercise for me, almost similar to writing poetry.
people often ask me why i love shooting film.
my go to answers are the gorgeous colors, the intentionality with each frame, the chemistry and science behind it, the slowness of developing and scanning.
however, when i look deeper /
it’s a connection to a more analog life.
i love so much about photography. but one of the things i love most is its time traveling ability, the immediate preservation of memories, its transportation to a place that once was.
last thoughts
after scanning hundreds of my childhood images for hours on end, AI seems like a world away.
yet one of the most scariest things about AI is the scale in which we’ve accepted it in the name of efficiency- it makes your life easier, frictionless. who wouldn’t want that?
yet with our adaptation to this so called efficiency, we sacrifice creativity, critical thinking, the ability to push deeper.
the tech giants of the world seem to have an insatiable need for a frictionless life, to seemingly glide through all situations without barriers— every whim answered by an AI chatbot. as Emine Saner wrote in the Guardian: “One of the ways it’s going to destroy humans, long before there’s a nuclear disaster, is going to be the emotional hollowing-out of people.”
the world has changed so, so dramatically the past few years; i don’t have the answers in which to guard yourself against the encroachment of AI on the creative fields, or even how to stop watching those addicting AI cat videos.
but when tools become available for them to do our thinking for us, it’s interesting to think how we leap to embrace those tools instead of questioning their necessity and the ethics behind their algorithms. this is not a debate about reduction of human labour (although it can be), but rather human creativity and autonomy.
ai isn’t going anywhere. so how do we use these tools for good, to aid us in our creative journey? what is the extent in which we use this tool?
how can we accept friction in our lives, to embrace the uncomfortable in order to achieve growth?
what does my analog way of life look like— for me, my community, my artistic practice + business?
i’ll leave you on this positive note.
people thought digital would immediately replace film, that cds would replace vinyl, that kindles would replace books. yet an analog life still prevails, and now is more authentic than ever.
“It is not simply that AI lacks originality; after all, so too does most human art. The problem runs far deeper: the essence of art is lost in the process of its machinic invention…
Art is not merely about arranging colors, forms, sounds or words into pleasing products. The essence of art inheres in its making.” (The Guardian).
𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝
i hope that the transition from summer to fall is treating you all well; i’m already deep in my tea brewing and sweater era, and the leaves in seattle are changing dramatically~
i’m in the busiest period of photography yet, with summer editing work softly piling onto fall, my favorite time to shoot.
it’s that time of year where i’m in a shoot-edit-deliver-shoot-edit cycle, and it’s pushing me to photograph at a faster pace and higher level. i’m excited to reflect on all that i’ve learned later in the winter months, but as of now i’m either deep in my editing cave or out shooting in this beautiful weather.
with everything that’s going on the world, hold tight to your communities and people, don’t stop talking about the things that matter, and keep making bad art over ai slop. i know i’m trying my best everyday◝(ᵔᵕᵔ)◜
warmly,
felicity
Felicity, your susbtack is becoming a favorite of mine.
The idea that our obsession with efficiency can hollow us out emotionally? It’s so true that friction, the slowness, even the imperfection of making art by hand or with analog tools is where depth tends to live.
Your point about the “frictionless life” resonates deeply. It reminds me that creativity often needs friction: the pause between shots, the failed experiments, the time we spend wrestling with a thought before it becomes something. In smoothing everything over, we risk losing the very tension that makes art feel human.
I find myself asking: what happens to our creative instincts when every barrier is removed? Maybe resistance itself—whether it’s film loading slowly, or light not quite behaving—is part of what keeps us connected to our work, and to ourselves.
Thank you for articulating this so beautifully. It’s a needed reminder in a time when speed is mistaken for substance.
— Ashley
Is it "optimizing our business" or is it an excuse to be lazy with our art? I wish people would just be honest it's about their financial success.