Our photo dumps used to be an aesthetic disruption. Now we’re just bending to the app’s will Last year, I took 658 photos during my four-day trip to Venice. Fifteen years ago, I would have posted every single one of them to Facebook. And as I waited the three hours for them to upload, I would have opened another tab to look through all 500 photos in my second-cousin’s friend’s FLORIDA ‘09 Facebook album, which would have included 48 shots of the same sunset and 16 of a chip flavor she didn’t have back at home. Nowadays, with Instagram as our primary photo-sharing method, that packet of chips would end up on slide seven of what my second-cousin’s friend would call a dump: a retrospective of her summer compacted into a carousel of artfully artless images. Continue reading...

As generative AI advances, it is easy to see it as yet another area where machines are taking over – but humans remain at the centre of AI art, just in ways we might not expect When faced with a bit of downtime, many of my friends will turn to the same party game. It’s based on the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse, and involves translating brief written descriptions into rapidly made drawings and back again. One group calls it Telephone Pictionary; another refers to it as Writey-Drawey. The internet tells me it is also called Eat Poop You Cat, a sequence of words surely inspired by one of the game’s results. As recently as three years ago, it was rare to encounter text-to-image or image-to-text mistranslations in daily life, which made the outrageous outcomes of the game feel especially novel. But we have since entered a new era of image-making. With the aid of AI image generators like Dall-E 3, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, and the generative features integrated into Adobe’s Creative Cloud programs, you can now transform a sentence or phrase into a highly detailed image in mere seconds. Images, likewise, can be nearly instantly translated into descriptive text. Today, you can play Eat Poop You Cat alone in your room, cavorting with the algorithms. Continue reading...

Models, athletes and TikTokers shun phone cameras as 35mm sales surge and a new Pentax film camera is launched This week, a new range of Google smartphones capable of AI image generation has been launched. But for an increasing number of people, the appeal of a less cutting-edge piece of equipment is proving hard to resist: the point-and-shoot camera. The US footballer Megan Rapinoe was seen snapping from the stands at the Paris Olympics. The model Alexa Chung captioned a recent Instagram of her with a camera: “Just another Millennial with a dependency on Snappy Snaps, fighting digital threat with an analogue mode. ” A recent glimpse of home-life for Rihanna and A$AP Rocky showed a disposable camera lying among the clutter. Kim Kardashian and Taylor Swift have both been snapped holding their point-and-shooters. Continue reading...

The New Zealand-born photographer was planning to take a portrait of a farm owner when two animals caught his eye For the last two years, Mark Aitken has been working on a photo series in Lapland. “It’s called Presence of Absence,” he says, “and it explores the liminal and sometimes uncanny boundaries between life and death experienced by people living in this extreme climate and landscape.” Aitken, who was born in New Zealand, raised in South Africa and has lived in London for years, took this photo in spring of this year, on a sheep farm. “Kukkola is a borderland hamlet in Finnish Lapland on the River Tornio, near Sweden. The farm has been running for 20 years and this lamb is one of about 100 born in March and April,” he says. Continue reading...