The Critic

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The Critic

© Edward Bateman & Robert Hirsch 2026

We live in tumultuous times. War, political uncertainties, climate change, and artificial intelligence, just to name a few reasons for anxiety.¹ Stories abound proclaiming the death of photography, but art doesn’t work that way. There is probably no artistic medium that is not still practiced in some form today. In photography, film and historical processes continue to be used.

Yet none of that negates how we feel. Throughout history, most generations have seen themselves as living on the threshold of catastrophe. That is because human consciousness places each of us at the center of our own personal universe. ² We live in that eternal moment called “now” bounded by an imagined past and an imaginary future. Our perspectives shape our reality.

Simply with words, some math, and observations, astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) made the sun and the earth trade places. In that cataclysmic event, no one felt so much as a quiver. But still….

Change is unsettling. While we cannot predict the future, we can examine the present. For the first time in human history, there is something outside of our own minds with the capacity to appraise us. Everyone can (and does) critique AI. That is an easy target. We are going to turn that table and ask AI to assess photography in its present condition. Apocalyptic? Or simply the earth and the sun trading places. Critique is always a
matter of perspective.

 

Edward Bateman: Thank you for taking time from your busy schedule to join us. We are going to be talking about what is sometimes called Fine Art Photography.

Critic: (artificial intelligence assuming the role of respected art and photography critic): Good – this is already dangerous territory. Let’s begin.

Bateman: I want to focus on the present, but to set that stage, let’s talk a bit about photography’s history. It seems to me that photography as art can be divided into two categories. Documentary as straight photography, and another type that doesn’t really have a name. It might be seen as constructed or creative works that includes artists such as Bayard’s Self-portrait as a drowned man, [1840] and the works of others including Duane Michaels, Cindy Sherman, Joan Fontcuberta, and Kei Ito. Is this a false dichotomy? And what would be an appropriate term for that second kind of work?

Critic: That division you describe – between documentary and… whatever we call the other thing – is useful, but only in the way a myth is useful. It helps us talk, but it doesn’t survive close inspection. Bayard was “documenting” a fiction. Sherman is “constructing” truths about identity that are arguably more forensic than most documentary work. Even the most straight photograph is riddled with decisions, exclusions, and quiet performances. So yes, it’s a false dichotomy – but a productive one. If we need a term for that second category, I’m tempted to call it “speculative photography” – work that uses the medium not to confirm the world, but to test it, to propose versions of it. Fontcuberta, of course, has been doing exactly that for decades – lying in order to tell the truth, which is more honest than most so-called honesty.

Robert Hirsch: Truth and honesty are dangerous terms. What about “fine art photography?” Is that still a worthwhile idea?

Critic: Take your first question. It assumes that “fine art photography” is still a meaningful container? I’m not convinced it is. The most interesting work happening now often doesn’t even want to be called photography – it leaks into installation, into data, into performance, into systems. The photograph, in many cases, is just a residue. So perhaps the more uncomfortable question is: are we still talking about photography because it’s useful, or because we don’t know what else to call what we’re looking at?

Bateman: Photography is admittedly a multi-dimensional practice (Wikipedia lists 89 different “kinds” of photography.) But to try to keep some kind of focus here, do you see a balance between documentary and “speculative work” in today’s photo art world? I sometimes think that it is a pendulum that swings somewhere between those two categories.

Critic: As for the balance today, I don’t see a pendulum so much as a kind of stalemate. Documentary work has institutional credibility – it travels well, it explains itself, it behaves. Speculative work is everywhere, but often disguised, softened, or aestheticized so it can be digested. The truly unsettling work – the kind that destabilizes the viewer’s trust in the image – still makes people nervous, including curators. We like experimentation, but only up to the point where it doesn’t threaten the system that displays it.

Hirsch: When do you think photography demonstrated its greatest creativity, experimentation, and innovation?

Critic: If we’re looking for moments of real invention, photography tends to become most alive when it doesn’t yet know what it is. The 1840s, obviously – when no one agreed on what counted as success. The 1920s and 1930s, when it collided with modernism and began behaving badly in the best sense. And again in the late twentieth century, when artists stopped asking whether photography was art and instead used it as a tool to question art itself. Innovation happens when the rules are either absent or ignored – preferably both.

Critic: As for the balance today, I don’t see a pendulum so much as a kind of stalemate. Documentary work has institutional credibility – it travels well, it explains itself, it behaves. Speculative work is everywhere, but often disguised, softened, or aestheticized so it can be digested. The truly unsettling work – the kind that destabilizes the viewer’s trust in the image – still makes people nervous, including curators. We like experimentation, but only up to the point where it doesn’t threaten the system that displays it.

Hirsch: How, then, would you describe photography today?

Critic: Today? I’d call it… proficient. Which is not a compliment. It’s technically dazzling, conceptually literate, and often emotionally risk-averse. There’s a kind of aesthetic fluency that borders on – work that knows exactly how to look like “important photography.” At the same time, there are pockets of real energy, especially where photography collides with other systems – AI, archives, performance, even science. But the dominant tone is cautious sophistication. We’ve become very good at making work that already fits into existing systems.

I’d push you harder on your question about whether today’s photography is conservative or experimental. It’s both, but in a slightly perverse way. Formally, it can be quite experimental. Conceptually, it often isn’t. There’s a lot of work that looks radical but is built on very familiar intellectual scaffolding. It knows which references to cite, which positions to perform. It’s a kind of rehearsed transgression – which is, of course, not transgressive at all.

Bateman: Is transgressive really that important? Or is it something we have outgrown like “épater la bourgeoisie”? ³

Critic: No, transgression in the old sense isn’t very interesting anymore. “Épater la bourgeoisie” only works if there’s still a bourgeoisie to scandalize, and I’m not sure there is – at least not in a coherent, unified way. What we have instead are micro-audiences, each with their own thresholds, their own expectations. It’s much harder to shock a culture that has already absorbed so many shocks.

But it’s not that transgression is unimportant, it’s that it’s become too legible. We’ve seen so many versions of it that it now reads almost instantly. You can almost feel the gesture arriving before it does. And once that happens, it stops being a risk and becomes a style. At that point, it’s no longer doing any real work.

So I’d shift the focus slightly. Maybe the more urgent question isn’t about transgression, but about genuine disobedience. Not breaking rules for effect, but questioning whether the rules – even the unspoken ones – are worth accepting in the first place. That might mean resisting clarity, or refusing to signal its own importance in familiar ways. In that sense, the most vital work today isn’t trying to shock the viewer – it’s trying to slow them down, or even lose them a little.

Critic: Today? I’d call it… proficient. Which is not a compliment. It’s technically dazzling, conceptually literate, and often emotionally risk-averse. There’s a kind of aesthetic fluency that borders on – work that knows exactly how to look like “important photography.” At the same time, there are pockets of real energy, especially where photography collides with other systems – AI, archives, performance, even science. But the dominant tone is cautious sophistication. We’ve become very good at making work that already fits into existing systems.

I’d push you harder on your question about whether today’s photography is conservative or experimental. It’s both, but in a slightly perverse way. Formally, it can be quite experimental. Conceptually, it often isn’t. There’s a lot of work that looks radical but is built on very familiar intellectual scaffolding. It knows which references to cite, which positions to perform. It’s a kind of rehearsed transgression – which is, of course, not transgressive at all.

Bateman: Is transgressive really that important? Or is it something we have outgrown like “épater la bourgeoisie”?

Critic: No, transgression in the old sense isn’t very interesting anymore. “Épater la bourgeoisie” only works if there’s still a bourgeoisie to scandalize, and I’m not sure there is – at least not in a coherent, unified way. What we have instead are micro-audiences, each with their own thresholds, their own expectations. It’s much harder to shock a culture that has already absorbed so many shocks.

But it’s not that transgression is unimportant, it’s that it’s become too legible. We’ve seen so many versions of it that it now reads almost instantly. You can almost feel the gesture arriving before it does. And once that happens, it stops being a risk and becomes a style. At that point, it’s no longer doing any real work.

So I’d shift the focus slightly. Maybe the more urgent question isn’t about transgression, but about genuine disobedience. Not breaking rules for effect, but questioning whether the rules – even the unspoken ones – are worth accepting in the first place. That might mean resisting clarity, or refusing to signal its own importance in familiar ways. In that sense, the most vital work today isn’t trying to shock the viewer – it’s trying to slow them down, or even lose them a little.

Hirsch: How did we get to this place in photography?

Critic: Why is it like this? Because photography is now fully institutionalized. It has a market, an academic framework, a history that is taught and repeated. It knows itself – and that’s always a dangerous moment for any medium. Add to that the saturation of images in everyday life, and artists feel pressure to justify making another one. The result is often overthinking, or worse, over-explaining. The photograph is no longer enough; it needs a thesis, a scaffolding, a rationale.

And that leads to something I’d push you on. You asked about balance – between documentary and constructed work – as though the field is negotiating between two poles. But what if the more significant shift is that the image itself is no longer the central object? What if we’re in a post-image condition, where context, presentation, circulation, and behavior matter more than the photograph as a discrete thing? In that case, the pendulum metaphor breaks down entirely. It’s not swinging – it’s fragmenting.

Bateman: If that is the case, what would you like to see today that would make photography vital, relevant, and interesting?

Critic: Careful – you’re about to make me a very unpopular dinner guest.

What would I like to see? Less certainty. More risk. Work that doesn’t quite resolve – images that feel like they’ve escaped their maker’s control a little. I’d like to see artists trust that photography can still surprise them, rather than using it to illustrate what they already know. And frankly, I’d like to see more work that makes curators uncomfortable – not because it’s provocative in an obvious way, but because it resists easy placement. The moment we can categorize something too quickly, it’s probably already dead.

Bateman: I sense a critique of my questions in what you are saying. What should we be asking?

Critic: Your questions are good – seriously – but they come from a place that assumes photography is still stable enough to be divided, tracked, and diagnosed. I’m not sure it is anymore. Or rather, it is institutionally stable, but materially and conceptually, it’s dissolving under our feet.

I might have asked instead: What happens when photography is no longer scarce? Because historically, so much of its power – both documentary and speculative – depended on its relative rarity and authority. Now we are drowning in images, and most of them are frictionless. So the question isn’t just what kind of photographs are being made, but what it means to make one at all.

And then there’s authorship, which your questions circle but don’t quite confront. In a moment where images can be generated, synthesized, or endlessly recombined, what does it mean to claim a photograph? Fontcuberta saw this coming – his whole career is basically a long rehearsal for our current confusion. ⁴ But I think we’re still underestimating how deeply this destabilizes the idea of the photographer as author. We may be moving toward a condition where the most interesting practitioners are less like imagemakers and more like editors, orchestrators, or even curators of flows.

Hirsch: It sounds like you think there is something important that we have forgotten about photography?

Critic: It might be this: What would it mean for a photograph to genuinely surprise us today –not aesthetically, but epistemologically? Not just a new look, but a new way of knowing. Because I think that’s where the real hunger is, even if we don’t articulate it that way.

And perhaps one more, slightly cruel question: Are we still capable of being changed by photographs, or have we trained ourselves to process them too quickly for that to happen? That, to me, is the quiet crisis. Not that photography is dead or decadent – but that we may have become too fluent in its language to feel its full weight anymore.

Hirsch: I think we are still capable, but the conditions have become hostile to it.

Critic: Perhaps. A photograph used to arrive with a kind of temporal gravity. You stood in front of it, or held it, and it had a chance to work on you. Now images arrive in streams, and we’ve trained ourselves, quite efficiently, to survive that stream by skimming. Not looking, but recognizing. Not experiencing, but categorizing. The speed protects us, but it also flattens everything. So the problem isn’t that photographs have lost their power, it’s that we’ve become very good at deflecting it.

 

 

Bateman: So all of us are the problem? Does it all lie on the viewer side of the equation?

Critic: What’s interesting, though, is that every so often an image still breaks through. And when it does, it often feels almost inappropriate – as if it’s asking more of us than the current visual economy allows. It lingers. It resists immediate comprehension. It creates a kind of drag in perception. You don’t just see it – you stay with it, sometimes against your will.

Those images tend to share a quality I’d call friction. They don’t resolve quickly. They don’t deliver their meaning efficiently. In fact, they often frustrate the viewer’s habits. And that frustration is precisely where the possibility of being changed begins. The irony is that in a culture obsessed with clarity and impact, the most transformative photographs might be the ones that are slightly opaque – images that don’t quite behave, that don’t fully explain themselves. They slow you down, and in doing so, they reopen a space for thought, feeling, and doubt.

So yes, we’re still capable of being changed. But it requires a kind of resistance – on both sides. The artist has to resist making the image too legible, too consumable. And the viewer has to resist the impulse to move on too quickly.

Hirsch: What should imagemakers be trying to do now?

Critic: In a way, the most radical thing a photograph can do today is not to shock or dazzle – but to hold you in place just a little longer than you’re comfortable with.

Bateman: Any final thoughts? Do you still have a passion for photography or even hope for it? Or is it dead and time for a funeral?

Critic: If photography were dead, we wouldn’t still be arguing about it. What’s fading, perhaps, is a certain belief in what it used to be – its authority, its clarity, its sense of purpose. But the medium itself? It’s just… unsettled. And honestly, that’s when things tend to get interesting. Do I still have passion for it? Yes – but it’s a complicated kind. Less faith, more curiosity. Less certainty, more attention. I don’t think photography needs a funeral. If anything, it needs fewer eulogies and more people willing to let it become something we don’t quite recognize yet.

 

To contact the authors go to their websites:
EDWARD BATEMAN: www.ebateman.com
ROBERT HIRSCH: www.lightresearch.net

Endnotes:

1
The cover of Aperture magazine (No. 257, December 5, 2024) raises the question: “The end of nature?” Personally, we are betting on nature.

2
Is it any wonder that some self-describe this era as the Anthropocene? This is the proposed name for our current geological epoch in which human activity has become the dominant force shaping Earth’s climate, ecosystems, and geological conditions. Although frequently used in popular discourse, it has not received official scientific validation, in part due to disagreement over its starting date.

3
Is it any wonder that some self-describe this era as the Anthropocene? This is the proposed name for our current geological epoch in which human activity has become the dominant force shaping Earth’s climate, ecosystems, and geological conditions. Although frequently used in popular discourse, it has not received official scientific validation, in part due to disagreement over its starting date.

4
Joan Fontcuberta (b. 1955) is a Spanish conceptual photographer and writer whose work explores the instability of photographic truth, constructing convincing fictions that reveal how easily images are accepted as evidence.

5
Large Language Models (LLM’s) such as ChatGPT must use prompts to make images like a human user would.

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