My Brain on Pixel Space and Boring Rules

Sometimes my brain independently interviews itself on certain topics. This time, a background process researches what I think about photography as an artistic medium. I managed to grab it by the tail.

Will AI Kill Photography?

Do you think AI will, at some point, become better at taking pictures than humans, and photography will be dead?

I am not afraid of what will happen. Stronger, there will be a point in time when AI will be better at creating a particular kind of picture. But that is not as disastrous as photographers think it is.

  1. The current capabilities of AI are vastly overrated. AI is still an aggregation of what is out there. There is no invention, no novelty. Will there ever be surprising novelty? Maybe. But would you be interested in it? I doubt it. For advertising, as illustration, but as art, that surprises and moves. I doubt it.

But suppose AI becomes better than us at taking pictures:

  1. Keep making pictures anyway. People are still playing chess. It’s the process, dude. I guess each of us needs to consider why we are taking pictures in the first place. Do you really want to leave such an important activity to an AI?
  2. It is our challenge to find something that AI can not do better than we can. It is our challenge to find something no one can do better than you, in general, as makers. AI capabilities would be a fantastic challenge to human creativity. We should embrace that challenge rather than be afraid of it.

Will things change? Yes. But we should not react with the same Luddite arguments as photographers did when digital photography emerged.

david hockney - collage of cropped photos

On Cropping and Creative Freedom

Something different: Do you crop your pictures?

Uninteresting question, and you will see why. Yes. I crop whenever I want to remove things from the picture I don’t like. I am not religious about cropping. Or applying whatever modification to the picture, in fact. If someone can make a lovely image from a photo by cropping everything except a single pixel, I am totally ok with that. Or when someone glues 273 images together to create a great picture, it’s totally fine.

Really, I am fearful of orthodoxies. You must… use 28mm for real street, apply golden rules, only photography at dawn/sunset/hard light/…, shoot from the hip/viewfinder, use layers/deadpan/… in your pictures, never crop, never pose, … Screw all that. Wolfgang Tilmans blew up low-res images to great pictures. David Hockney cut and glued images to create fabulous artworks. Even Elliott Erwitt cropped the hell out of his photos.

I don’t want to limit my creativity by any such orthodoxy.

The Finite Space of All Images

My brain is researching the creative border. On that … Lately, I was also thinking about the limited pixel space we operate in. Say our images are 1000 by 1000 pixels, that is 1 million pixels, but the size does not really matter. It could be a million by a million, that is not the point. Each pixel in the one-million-pixel space can have 256 different color values (or 16000; again, the exact number does not matter). Then the total number of possible pictures is 256^1000000 (256 to the power of 1000000). That is a lot, but it is a finite number of pictures. Think about that.

These pictures include everything we can photograph around us, at any moment in time. Everything we see today, tomorrow, any picture we take fits in that space. And anything that happened in the past. A portrait of Napoleon, the building of the pyramids, a Neanderthal, a dinosaur, the Earth being hit by a giant meteor, everything.

I am only orthodox about trying not to be orthodox.

Street photographer can’t help himself

Street photographer, you take a picture when you see such a scene. Can’t help yourself.

Street photography - boy hiding under his mothers jacket

The dangerous but exciting habit of always carrying a camera

I always carry a camera with me. Even in the car. Admittedly that is dangerous, but it can also be rewarding. Yesterday I caught this picture.

Hollandse Beelden – Eddy Posthuma de Boer

Eddy Posthuma de Boer kende ik vooral van zijn foto’s in de reisboeken van Cees Nooteboom. En natuurlijk van Libretto.

https://www.eddyposthumadeboer.com/

Naar aanleiding van een grote overzichtstentoonstelling in Fotomuseum Den Haag gaf Hollands Beelden een speciale editie uit met alleen werk van Eddy Posthuma de Boer. De eerste helft zijn zwart-wit beelden, meest straatfotografie, met zijn typische humoristische toets. Het tweede deel is kleur en gemaakt in opdracht, voor de wereldtentoonstelling in Osaka in 1969. Het werk in kleur is meest geposeerd maar heeft toch een typisch EPDB stijl.

Ed van der Elsken, street photographer in love

I visited Ed van der Elsken’s retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum. Van der Elsken is chaotic and distinctly extroverted, an expressionist. His films are messy and experimental. The exhibition was impressive, but mostly, it was a lot.

I came down the stairs with a full head. The book De Verliefde Camera is the catalog of this retrospective. In the introduction, Hripsimé Visser, the catalog’s compiler, calls the work vibrant and dynamic. Surely that seems like an understatement. The book gives an overview of Van der Elsken’s work chronologically.

Paris, street photographs. Then, a series called A Love Story: Love on the Left Bank. The photographs in this series are large areas of black, little light, and stark—more lust than love.

Then Africa. Again, rather dark photos. Where the story is anthropological, in my opinion, Van der Elsken was much more interested in the aesthetics of black people. Close-ups of Negroes and Negresses, and I don’t mean that as a swear word, but as an indication of the style of the photographs. Photographs that are not about life in Africa as their subject but much more about the anatomy of the African man.

Sweet Life. Van der Elsken at his best: street photographs of everything that comes in front of the camera that he finds interesting. Here, Van der Elsken measures up to William Klein and Robert Frank.

Amsterdam. There are street photos, reportage-style photos, and portraits. Again, the individual photos are the strongest. The street photos are of everyday things.

Eye Love You. Color for the first time. Everyday scenes. Topper: a photo of elderly ladies with sunglasses and in neat dresses photographing two Negro children as if they were at the zoo. The vicarious blush comes to your cheeks.

Japan. Again, the street photos of someone who takes unfettered pictures of everyday subjects.

Ultimately, Ed van der Elsken was primarily an excellent street photographer who tried to make ends meet through his photography. His street photographs are world-class.