Dragons in the Backyard. Clarkesville, Georgia.
One pleasant early fall day as my son Rob and I were wandering around northeast Georgia to see (and photograph) whatever of interest we might find, we were driving along a street that ran by the backyards of some houses, when Rob suddenly exclaimed "Dad! Look at that!" It was a cast metal dragon and an eagle in someone's backyard. So of course I stopped and made a few photographs.
Could this picture have been created by AI? Of course. But who would have thought of it?
The essence of photography is that it is photographic. 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. When a photograph is altered, digitally or otherwise, it becomes no longer a photograph, but something else: perhaps a subset of painting or collage. Rauschenberg, for instance, creates work that I would categorize as collage. It may be artistic in itself, it may use photography as an element or a point of departure, but it is not photography.
The photographer 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 alter and/or combine 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. 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. It is the most powerful purely visual medium ever created.AI is great for things like commercial illustration and advertising (although it's putting some commercial photographers out of business). But not for the photography that matters to people like me. I want my photographs to be real. To show the world as it actually exists. People can use AI to alter and "improve" their photographs, but if their creations are presented as real photographs, I think that is destructive to the art of photography.
So. . .AI? Not I.
The photo: Olympus E-M5, Panasonic 14-140mm lens
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Text and photographs copyright David B. Jenkins 2026.
I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.