AI and the Death of Photography

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This third of several essays on artificial intelligence (AI) explores its potential relationship to creativity. The authors see writing these essays as a creative exchange that recognizes the future of AI to be unpredictable.

Essay #3

AI and the Death of Photography

By Edward Bateman and Robert Hirsch

Figure 3.1 Unknown maker. AI Killed Photography, 2025.
Variable dimensions. Digital file.

Tombstone reads: “In Memory of Photography, 1826 – 2025, A Witness to truth, A Keeper of Light, Killed by AI, A Replacement that never touched the moment.” This image has been circulating online as a visual critique of AI’s impact on traditional photography. While the exact creator of this image is not definitively confirmed, it has been shared by various photographers and artists expressing concerns about AI-generated imagery. One example is a Facebook post by photographer Wes Snyder, who shared the image alongside a caption stating, “As a professional photographer I don’t think photography is dead or that AI – Artificial Intelligence can ever kill what we do as professionals.” This suggests that while Snyder, shared the image, he may not be its original creator (see: www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1245376453617853&id=100044365302026&set=a.250483056440536)

 

The boundaries which divide Life from Death
are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say
where the one ends, and where the other begins?”

— Edgar Allan Poe, The Premature Burial (1844) [i]

A shroud of mourning seems to be hanging over photography once again – especially in the academy. Whispers of its demise echo through articles and galleries, lamenting that artificial intelligence (AI) has severed the medium’s tether to truth, to light, and to lived experience. Like mourners gathered at a premature grave, we tremble before what we fear has been lost — but Poe’s words remind us: death is often mistaken, and burial does not always mean the end. Photography has always been a conjurer’s art, a delicate truce between presence and absence. If AI unsettles our faith in the image, it also forces us to reckon anew with the haunted magic that was there from the beginning.

How fitting that an AI, itself accused of murdering photography, should conjure an image of a gravestone mourning its victim. Claims of photography’s demise have always been more of a reaction than a postmortem. In the nineteenth century, it was said that photography would kill painting. In the twentieth, it was that digital imaging would kill darkroom craft. Now, some declare that AI has sounded photography’s final death knell. Yet as Poe reminds us, death is rarely so clear-cut. Artificial intelligence, with its ability to fabricate images from words alone, has shaken photography’s claim to be a witness to truth. Yet truth in photography was never simple, and death in art is rarely absolute. What we witness now may be less the final chords of a funeral requiem than the overture to a widening and evolving conversation — one about what it means to see, to create, and to remember.

This portrait of Edgar Allan Poe was made as a gift for Mrs. Annie L. Richmond. In 1876, she wrote: “It does not do him justice — indeed, I have never seen a picture that did — his face was thin… [here] he looks very stout, & his features heavy, which makes it seem almost like a caricature — yet, he certainly sat for it.” Even in photography’s infancy, likeness and truth were already contested. In preparing this image, AI software was used to enlarge and enhance a small digital file, yielding results that surpassed traditional digital methods.

From its earliest moments, photography has lived in tension between truth and art. Its power to mirror reality made it a marvel, but also a threat. Was it a neutral recording device, or an expressive art form? Its indexical nature — that link between image and object, light and subject — seemed to promise a kind of truth painting could never achieve. But that same quality was used to discredit it as too mechanically accurate to be art. Truth or Art? Objectivity or Creation? Photography, like the photograph, can be like an overlapping double exposure, capable of being multiple things at once.

Throughout its history, the definition of “true photography” has been policed and contested. In 1888, when George Eastman launched the Kodak camera with the slogan, “You push the button, we do the rest,” it outraged those who believed photography required skill and intention. Alfred Stieglitz responded by founding the Photo-Secession, asserting a more artistic vision. Not so much a death, but a self-imposed exile of protest from what photography had become. Group f/64, decades later, pushed in the opposite direction, rejecting manipulation in favor of “straight photography,” aiming for clarity and truth through “previsualization” and technical precision. In each case, a technological change provoked aesthetic realignments—not a death, but a theoretical shift.

The Kodak was a revolutionary marketing promise that democratized photography by removing technical complexity from the user’s experience by hiding the process behind the picture. Today, AI-generated images echo that same shift: minimal input, maximum automation. Just as Kodak disrupted studio photographers, AI threatens traditional photographic jobs, from stock photography to commercial and portrait work. The craft is invisible, but the questions remain—who is the imagemaker, and what do we lose when the machine does the rest?

Postmodernism challenged photography’s supposed objectivity head-on. Artists like Cindy Sherman and Laurie Simmons made work that was technically straight, but unquestionably contrived. Others like Sarah Charlesworth, Sherrie Levine, and Richard Prince used appropriation to dismantle the idea that photography was ever about truth. As artist and essayist Joan Fontcuberta later observed:

Today, apropriationist precepts are fully established. The mass proliferation and accessibility of images make appropriation seem “natural,” so natural and widespread that it is devoid of critical radicality and transgressive spirit. It is a spontaneous operation that we come to perform without realizing it: images are too easily within our reach. The iconic ecosystem forces us to recycle and remix. ^[ii]

Cindy Sherman staged self-portraits to explore identity, blurring the lines between reality and fiction, much like how AI-generated images now raise questions about authenticity.

Digital photography only heightened the tension. With Photoshop and other editing tools, indexicality seemed to erode completely. Critics mourned the end of photographic truth. Curator Sarah Greenough would write in her introduction to the 2015 National Gallery exhibition and book The Memory of Time:

The invention of digital photography… forever shattered the medium’s hold on truth, undermined its supposed objectivity, and decimated its evidentiary status, for now nothing in a photograph need be real; everything could be fabricated. If photography was no longer a faithful witness, what was it? [iii]

Photography could not have remained analog. In a world rapidly transitioning to digital, only the obstinately physical would remain untouched. Many people no longer skim magazines and newspapers, but screens. First came the internet and now phones have become the source of nearly all media. ^[iv] Yet digital tools did not end photography—they expanded it.

Bayard’s image challenged the prevailing belief that photography was a medium of objective truth. In staging his own death and captioning the image with a fictional suicide note, Bayard demonstrated that photography could convey fiction, protest, and satire, foreshadowing conceptual and narrative photography by over a century. Note: Bayard’s face and hands were sunburnt from working in his garden.

 

Today, AI is the new target of this anxiety. By generating images from language, it bypasses the camera entirely. The result feels uncanny: an image that looks photographic, but has no referent in the physical world. Some critics argue this violates the essential definition of photography. But is the presence of a camera really the core of the matter? What about cliché-verre, chemograms, direct emulsion manipulation, luminograms, photograms, and X-rays? Photography has always included practices where the final image is not a direct record of reality. Consider Hippolyte Bayard’s pivotal staged image Self Portrait as a Drowned Man (1840) that deliberately constructs a narrative rather than documenting reality. The composite print tableaus of Oscar Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson are two more early examples of photography’s continuous history of breaking with observed reality in the name of art.

AI complicates authorship, but it also continues to democratize creation. Like the Kodak snapshot, it lowers the entry barriers to imagemaking. By enabling creators to visualize “mindscapes” that transcend physical reality, AI broadens the artistic scope of photography. As animal-rights and autism advocate Dr. Temple Grandin argues in her book Visual Thinking (2022) ^[v], our society often privileges verbal thinkers over visual ones. Perhaps AI is beginning to tip that balance. Prompts may not require traditional camera skills, but they demand imagination, judgment, and aesthetic choice. As in William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature (1844-1846), AI serves as a “pencil of the mind,” broadening and reshaping the boundaries of creative possibility by inviting participation from many voices previously excluded from photographic discourse. One thing appears likely, AI’s integration into photography is not merely a technical evolution, but a profound disruptive cultural shift. It compels us to reconsider what it means to imagine, to innovate, and to be creative. Bob Dylan shattered expectations with his confrontational lyrics in songs Like a Rolling Stone (1965) that marked his change from acoustic folk to electric rock. Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) warned us: “We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.” [vi] Photography has never been immune to this — nor we to it. AI is no exception. The real question is: will we wield it as a tool for insight and deeper expression… or let it reduce photography to spectacle and sameness?

The composition reinforces McLuhan’s role as both observer and subject within the media landscape he famously theorized. More efficient analysis of experimental data increases productivity for experts who know how to use it. AI’s most revolutionary potential is helping professionals better and faster direct their knowledge. But for that to be effective, there has to be discoveries.

Of course, AI also demands ethical scrutiny. Questions of originality, appropriation, and authorship reemerge with force. As with early digital photography, some call for segregating AI-generated images with labels such as AI illustrations —as if the authenticity of photography has ever been so pure, or so easily defended. History suggests that the boundaries will blur, and practices will intermingle. Maybe there is something atavistic about insisting that images must be precisely categorized by means of creation – especially when so many artists now consider themselves to be interdisciplinary. Perhaps modes of depiction may be a more useful concept. Photorealism was an art movement that arose in the late 1960s, particularly in painting and drawing, that aimed to create artworks that were visually indistinguishable from a photograph. When cinema moved to a digital format it rendered the idea of video obsolete. We do not reject those elements in a motion picture that were made with Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) except when they are poorly done. And unless the depictions are of the truly fantastical, we probably do not pay much attention to what is digital and what is purely photographic. It all appears photographic, and we accept is as such. To insist otherwise, may leave only the most banal of images as being above suspicion. Likewise, the issue is not whether AI images are photographs, but whether they engage meaningfully with the visual language of photography. Can one use the language of AI to express entirely new things?

Text reads: “Stealing in un-American. Tell Washington to make Big Tech pay for content it takes. Support ResponsibleAI.org. News in Media Alliance. Cold-set Web offset printing. Companies like The New York Times are suing OpenAI (and sometimes its partner Microsoft) primarily over concerns related to copyright infringement, unauthorized use of content, and competitive harm. They allege that OpenAI used millions of its copyrighted articles to train AI models like ChatGPT without permission or compensation.

And what of truth? Even the most straightforward photograph has the potential to be misleading. Photographs seem to claim factuality. But their framing, cropping, caption, and surroundings all contribute to our reading of an image. Context defines meaning. Furthermore, it is human nature to accept as truth those things that reenforce what we already believe. It is easy to forget that critical thinking is a learned skill that must be determinedly exercised. Alas, there will always be those who will use any means to be deceptive. Perhaps truth is no longer the most useful framework. Meaning, not factuality, may be a more durable standard. And a photograph need not document a fact to express a truth.

Morera referenc the queer history of the pegamachos from the 1970s (cowboysfrom the Guanacaste Coastines Costa Rica), who became renowned for their secret affairs with young gay men. Given their undercover lifestyle, anonymity is paramount to guarding the pegamachos’ safety. As such, Morera employed AI to create the work and hide people’s real identities. The Getty Museum acquired the work through its photography curator Paul Martineau, who considers this piece to be a photograph rather than a work of AI.

 

The tension between technology and tradition in art is not new, but characteristic of photography. Painting has changed little over the centuries; photography constantly changes. From daguerreotypes to Instagram filters, from wet plates to AI, the medium evolves with each new tool. The goal should not be to preserve a singular definition of photography, but to understand its changing vocabulary.

AI may not use lenses or light-sensitive film, but it engages with photographic thinking: framing, representation, atmosphere, and meaning. It opens new spaces for seeing. And as many artists are beginning to discover, AI can be used not just to imitate photography, but to interrogate it—to ask questions about vision, power, and perception. What matters is not the means of creation, but the result. Does the image resonate? Does it reveal? Does it ask something of us? These are the questions photography has always posed — queries that AI can help us explore, not silence.

Nothing strengthens the case for tradition more than its destruction. Even though new ways of doing things arise, few people have the courage to be different from their peers. This historical struggle between those who adhere to the classic definition of photography while wanting to be contemporary becomes an affliction that cannot be won. Therefore, what we need to do is to keep asking ourselves: Does AI expand or repress our potential to look inward and define what is a vital expression of our humanity? Can human directed AI works become more than the sum of its parts and convey a lived experience or might we become the muse of AI? This requires the critical ability to debate, interrupt, and decide if AI offers something of value we can incorporate into our thinking. This search for knowledge is key as the world changes whether you want it to or not. The ultimate test is whether or not AI generated works hold up to examination and create new and accepted modes of photographic expression.

Photography has never belonged solely to the realm of the factual. From its earliest days, it has been a twilight art — balancing between the seen and the unseen, the documentary and the dream. Truth and Art. Artificial intelligence, for all its unnerving powers, has not so much killed photography as cast a sharper light upon its age-old duality. We are not witnessing a death, but a revelation: that photography’s magic has always lived partly in shadows. As Poe wrote in The Premature Burial, “We peer into the abyss with a shudder — it is the abyss of uncertainty, the twilight between the real and the unreal.” [vii] And it is within that very twilight that photography endures, restless, evolving, and still very much alive.

In the predigital age, Abbott captured the tension between human presence and mechanical complexity. The woman appears almost engulfed by the wires, suggesting the growing dominance of machines in modern life, foreshadowing anxieties about human agency within the increasingly automated world. Today the image resonates powerfully with concerns about artificial intelligence, especially around issues of labor displacement, technological opacity, and the blurred boundaries between humans and machines.

Our next essay will continue with an examination of how photography and AI are reshaping our understanding of image, illusion, intent, and understanding.

Readers are invited to provide feedback via the author’s websites.

Edward Bateman: http://www.ebateman.com

Robert Hirsch: https://lightresearch.net/light/

Endnotes
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[i] Four years after Edgar Allan Poe wrote an essay on the invention of photography, he wrote the short story The Premature Burial (1844). In this work, the narrator, obsessed with the fear of being buried alive — a common fear in Poe’s era — recounts real-life cases where people were mistakenly pronounced dead and interred while still living. He reveals that he suffers from catalepsy, a condition that causes deathlike states, deepening his terror. To guard against being buried alive, he takes extreme precautions, including designing a special tomb with escape mechanisms. However, after a terrifying personal experience (mistakenly believing he was buried alive but realizing he was merely trapped in a small boat), he confronts his fears and resolves to live a more active and fearless life. The story blends medical horror with psychological suspense, capturing the era’s anxieties about death and misdiagnosis.

[ii] Joan Fontcuberta, “La obra de arte en la era de la adopción digital,” in La furia de las imágenes: Notas sobre la postfotografía (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg S.L., 2022), 58, trans. Edward Bateman.

[iii] Sarah Greenough, “Introduction,” in The Memory of Time: Contemporary Photographs at the National Gallery of Art (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2015), 1.

[iv] It is interesting to ponder the question of how long it would have taken for light-based images to become a digital technology if the analog model of photography had not existed.

[v] Temple Grandin, Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions (New York: Riverhead Books, 2022).

[vi] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), ix.

[vii] Edgar Allan Poe, “The Premature Burial,” in The Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Chartwell Books, 2024), 263.