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GD McClintock's avatar

Your statement that film cameras "preport to preserving [sic] what they see without any modifications" is naïve. (What a wonderful typographical error, like a glimpse into a writer's unconscious: "preport" means forebode; "purport" means profess, usually falsely.) Whatever we produce with image-making devices will be mediated by our technology (pencil, pen, camera lucida, camera obscura, camera, scanner, etc.). In other words, there is no image without modification inherent in whatever document, fantasy, or emotion we hope to reflect or reproduce. Film is not the degree zero of photography. Reicsh's remark, "Photography is undead, a zombie...." is straight out of Barthes. Analog processes have not disappeared, but have been revitalized by artists and socio-economically privileged amateurs. Ironically, your statement that "digital cameras do tremendous amounts of digital manipulation to what is captured" is true only for those countless souls who cannot escape the tyranny of auto- (focus, aperture, ISO, shutter, etc., ad nauseam).

As for Boris Eldagsen's award winning "The Electrician," the controversy is not that the image was created by AI, but that such a contrite cliché would even make Sony's short list.

Like photography, writing inspires discovery. Bonne continuation.

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CHRISTOPHER FRANKLIN's avatar

Ah, this is complicated. The image in the competition isn't exactly a render i.e. a completely synthetic image but something in the fringes of a collage i.e. an artificial image created from sources which include actual photographs blended together. It is so close to the edge that I wouldn't exactly call it a photograph and would say it is a digital collage. My own sense is that trying to coin a new term probably won't work for the same reason that people might say they will dial you up on their cell phone. I knew a photographer who occasionally had to do photography for evidence in court; he explained to me that a photo was never evidence in an of itself so the photographer had to testify and explain how the image was taken. Digital cameras have long left the realm of directly mirroring an unvarnished reality as evidenced by https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/13/23637401/samsung-fake-moon-photos-ai-galaxy-s21-s23-ultra. It is complicated. I have had to generate false color images for publications and constantly remind myself that everything is an interpretation.

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