‘Bus Stop Chips’

A stranger’s chip spill creates some accidental art at the bus stop. Thank you unknown stranger. You have wrists like Jackson Pollock.

I love the process of photography. That extra beat when you notice something quirky or aesthetically pleasing. The strange stories that emerge as a series of images start to form a narrative.

In photography there’s a debate around AI imagery. That it’s cheating or stealing (in terms of the data it’s trained off) and will accelerate job losses for photographers.

Like the internet and electricity, it’s a technology that’s not going away. I’m heavily immersed in it. I enjoy playing with the different chatbots, creating things and using it to make my work life easier. I suspect in a few short months and years in will turn the world on its head in ways cannot concieve of today, good and bad.

I take pictures of bits of rubbish, broken buildings and things that make me smile or double take. It’s hard to imagine losing that buzz just because there’s a magic tool (and there are already many in the AI world, like MidJourney Dall-E) that can produce something beautiful and photorealistic in seconds from a single prompt.

Most of the enjoyment we get from creating things is in the doing, the process. The kinds of instant fixes that AI will deliver are great and often extremely useful (and will be life saving even, in some fields). But when it comes to making or creating, unless it’s something we really don’t enjoy doing or feel passionate about, I think there will room for art, photography and writing from humans.

Supermarkets stock every kind of food imaginable, from every corrner of the world, and yet people get enormous joy foraging. Perfect pots made and fired by machines and robots can be picked up for pennies, yet potters still handmake and customers still pay a premium for their creations. There is room for humans and tech to coexist.