Retired snapshot, 2018

Now going on year 17, the Snapshots gallery is back online. This time it’s a bit different, as with the rest of the site, all work from before 2020 has been archived. It does kind of limit what I can put online location-wise, as I’ve only been out of Los Angeles a few times since COVID. It also means most of the photos were taken with my old iPhone SE and some of the grainy, weirder ones from early on—using my iPhone 6—have also been put to rest.

Nevertheless, I do really enjoy this project, if for no other reason it keeps me hunting for photos when otherwise I might ignore the world around me. I would imagine with the next update (which will include shots from my newly-upgraded iPhone 17) will be a bit more substantive, but I want to start filling out the galleries and getting a larger archive of work online.

One project I always loved was The Dissonance Polaroids, an abstracted instant film series I worked on from 2013-2015—three from the original batch can be seen above. I’ve returned to that with a refined conceptual approach and put the first results online to view. I am doing this new volume as four-image sets and will likely update the gallery when five new sets are complete.

Wilton and Wilshire

For some time now, I’ve used the Adobe Lightroom mobile app to edit photos I take on my phone, such as this one snapped today on my drive home. However, when I went to edit the photo upon getting home, Adobe had an update to promote to me:

On Lightroom Desktop and Mobile, the headline feature is Generative Expand, which Adobe first rolled out in Photoshop in mid-2023. The tool uses generative AI to extend a photo beyond its original borders, filling transparent areas created by perspective adjustments or making room for new aspect ratios without leaving blank edges

The Generative UI in question

There’s plenty of debate about AI ‘art,’ even though most people who are pro-AI have little to no appreciation for creative process or results—however when it comes to photography, using Generative AI is somehow more offensive. Photography, by its fundamental nature, is documentation. Evidence. An account of reality, interpreted through a lens certainly, but otherwise, nothing that exists in a photograph was not in the scene that was shot.

To use Gen AI in any kind of photographic tool is to go against the very nature of photography. While the people who are shoving AI down our throats at every corner have absolutely no appreciation for the nature of the foundations of how we make things, they also disregard why we make them, or how significant these processes and results are to the relationship humanity has to itself and the world.

People promoting AI exist completely within the idea of technologically-driven bubbles that serve purposes of, well, I don’t even know, coordinating meetings better? Client pitches? Coding apps? A projected version of the world that doesn’t exist but serves the idea of selfish indulgence? Certainly nothing honest, nothing dignified, nothing human.

While there are likely ballistic wars coming over resources such as water, wealth, energy, and political domain, there’s this brewing existential, intangible conflict about the fundamental nature of how we relate to one another, how we share reality, how we celebrate it, and what it actually comprises that is becoming an increasingly depressing landscape.