“Humankind lingers unregenerately  in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth.” First paragraph, first chapter of On Photography

It was in 1978 that I discovered Susan Sontag’s book and I am constantly going into it for fresh reference. A year ago at the lovely bookstore Nooroongji in Granville Island I found a lovely little book by Sontag I did not know she had written.

I am now re-reading it and I have come to the conclusion that it represents all that is in her On Photography in a concise form. Through war photographs she explores truth and credibility.

The photograph I have here I could tell you was a kidnapping I happened to photograph when I was downtown one evening. Many might believe me. The fact is that Harvey Southam’s Equity (a fine business magazine that was) hired me to shoot a fake kidnapping. In all I took a whole roll (36 exposures) of very fast Kodak b+w film.

To me the photograph represents Sontag’s point about credibility well and were she alive she would probably write on how AI has affected the credibility of photographs. Someone in the past century wrote that in court the only kind of photographic evidence that might have been accepted was a Polaroid.

Many of my photographer friends object when I tell them that a very early version of AI was the first Adobe Photoshop that was introduced in 1990. It was then that photographers could put penguins in the Sahara Desert.

I have written about AI in relation to photography here. I insist in believing that portrait photographers with a personal style will survive a while longer. I will not be around (happily) when that is no longer true.

Artificial Intelligence - My Take