Horse Laugh. U.S, Highway 11, Riceville, Tennessee
There's much discussion these days among those involved in creative fields about AI -- Artificial Intelligence. AI can do wondrous things: it can write an essay or a magazine article. It can make a sculpture. It can even create a photograph.
No, wait! Did I say AI can make a photograph? That's not true. It can make something that may look like a photograph, but it's not a photograph. The essence of photography is that it is a picture made by the action of light reflected from something that has objective reality onto a sensitized surface. Light rays bouncing off something that is really there go through a lens and are recorded onto film, a sensor of some kind, or something not yet invented, but whatever it is, it is "writing with light." The unique power of photography is derived from this direct connection to reality.
Dorothea Lange kept a quotation by the English essayist Francis Bacon on her darkroom door: “The contemplation of things as they are, without error or confusion, without substitution or imposture, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention." As Fred Picker said in the March 1994 issue of Shutterbug, "This Koudelka (print by Czech photographer Joseph Koudelka) on the wall contains the most amazing combination of things that I know happened, because when he made that photograph there was no electronic imaging. Here are two horses, standing in a certain position, a boy sitting on a bicycle wearing an angel suit with angel wings, here's an old lady scolding him, all in magnificent light and beautifully composed. Today, that picture could be made by some guy sitting in front of a computer. Knowing that would take all the wonder out of it."
In actuality, it isn’t likely some guy sitting in front of a computer would make such a picture, because those who create "photographs" are limited by their imaginations. They can only do what they can conceive. But photography goes beyond human imagination. As novelist Tom Clancy has said, “The difference between fiction and non-fiction is that fiction has to make sense.” The magic of photography is that life holds so many amazing and wonderful things that are entirely unanticipated, unexpected, even unimagined in the deepest sense; that is -- no one would ever have thought of such a thing happening. And then, suddenly, right out of the fabric of life, there it is.
"I can do a beautiful illustration, but it doesn't have that 'instant of wonder' that a photograph will have." (Art Director Tony Anthony, quoted in "Photo District News," February, 1987.) Photography shows us things that lie beyond our imagination and compel our amazement because they really happened. It revels in the beauty, the mystery, and the strangeness of life.
I repeat: the unique power of photography is derived from its direct connection to reality. It is the most powerful purely visual medium ever created.
Signed copies of the new second edition of Backroads and Byways of Georgia
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Check out the pictures at my online gallery: https://davejenkins.pixels.com/ Looking is free, and you might find something you like.
Photography copyright 2023 The Estate of Fritz Henle. Text copyright 2023 David B.Jenkins.
I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.
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