It’s No Longer Film VS. Digital! You Must Join Together

Film and digital photography, come here, listen to me. Yeah, I’m talking to you Nikon F2 and Canon R5. Hasselblad 500C/M and Nikon D750. And yes you, Leica IIIG and Fuji X100. I know you’ve been going at it for some time now, fighting over who’s better. Film says they are. Digital says they are. Which is just silly because you’re both great in so many ways and you each excel at different things. You’re both essential to photography.

Listen to me. I know you’re stubborn and think only one of you can win, but you’re both already proven winners. And you have more in common than you think. See, you’re both photographies. You’ve got a common factor that you share–you make photographs with light. (That’s actually the very definition of ‘photography’: Drawing with light.)

But there’s a new player in town. They call themselves Artificial Intelligence, AI for short. The thing is, they’re calling themselves photography, acting like they’re photography, even Adobe is buying into it by adding it into their Photoshop program and people are buying it. Even though it’s just computational painting using a database of content (much of it your own), there’s nothing photographic about it--it doesn’t use light to make images.

Instead of AI, it really should be called plagiarized assemblages. PA for short.

Again, it’s not photography in any way. It’s true it’s artificial and it’s only intelligent in its ability to fool the masses.

In the future, people are going to see its PAs and think they’re real. They just did–there was a PA that looked like an explosion in front of the Pentagon and the plagiarized assemblage went viral. PA knows no one is going to check. PA knows that humans are emotional and will react at the slightest provocation.

So do all the people behind PA and pushing PA as a good thing. Something that’s going to change the world. Yes, it will make everything suspect and nothing credible. It will be one giant source of fakery and we will all be misinformed. It will cause even more division amongst us (as if we’re not already divided enough)!

So, instead of fighting each other–digital and film–it’s time to get together. To stand behind what photography is and not just a hodgepodge of elements in some order a computer is commanded to assemble them, but an actual representation of light on your recording medium, electronic or silver.

Your RAW files and gelatin silver negatives will be the only source for credible images going forward. We need you both!

Film and digital, you are photography. You are the real deal, both of you. It’s time to come together as there’s a big fight brewing about what photography is and what gets to be called photography.

AI, er I mean PA is trying to move into that category. AI is already seen as such.

So, here’s the deal. Again, you’ve been winners all along. Stop fighting already. Join forces. And together you can beware of this new charlatan in town, this snake oil salesman, this sham technology trying to make people think they’re the next best thing, the sham tool that everyone wants and needs.

As much as they try (and they’re currently getting all the press), they’ll never have what you have.

They’ll never see what you see.

The light!