Technical skill is no longer a filter. What remains of photography begins where execution stops protecting the work, leaving only judgment and intent.
AI didn’t kill photography; it exposed it. Now that the technological process is complete, technical thresholds no longer function as a professional filter. This shift began long before artificial intelligence, but AI brings it to its logical endpoint—removing the last barriers separating mere competence from true intention.
This shift started before AI entered everyday photographic practice. It began when photography started losing friction. Each new tool reduced resistance, shortened feedback loops, and lowered the cost of arriving at a competent result. AI completes that trajectory, removing the final obstacles and leaving only what never depended on automation.
For a long time, technical skill functioned as gatekeeping. Clean hair masking in Photoshop once demanded hours of manual work. Exposure was calculated through systems that punished mistakes. Color was shaped through trial and visual memory rather than presets. Difficulty filtered participation through endurance rather than judgment. Access was slow, expensive, and unforgiving.
That difficulty also created friction. Retouching skin for hours meant studying a face. Manual focus required waiting, watching, and choosing a moment rather than correcting it later. Resistance forced attention and slowed decision-making, embedding reflection into the act of making. Craft not only produced results; it imposed time spent thinking.
AI removes that friction. Results arrive without resistance—not because images are worse, but because the process no longer enforces contemplation. Technical mastery is no longer rare, and once rarity disappears, it stops functioning as a professional filter.
From Execution to Judgment
The next consequence follows directly. Interfaces no longer protect expertise. Where photographers once learned tools, they now articulate intentions. The work shifts away from how to adjust settings and toward deciding what should change. Learning no longer accumulates through prolonged error but through immediate outcomes.
When execution becomes instant, experience loses its protective role. It no longer differentiates one photographer from another. It remains present, but it no longer filters entry or outcome. What once separated levels of practice flattens into the background. This shift has nothing to do with physical presence or the ability to capture a moment. It concerns the value of the image that remains once the moment has passed.
This produces a new condition: the dictatorship of the average. AI systems are trained on statistical consensus. They optimize for results that are balanced, competent, and immediately acceptable. The algorithm offers a version of perfection that is statistically bulletproof but emotionally vacant. It is a state where every image is competent, yet none are necessary. If your value is built on reaching this standard, you are not a creator; you are a technician competing with a ghost.
This also reframes the idea of luck. The algorithm can now synthesize the appearance of the “perfect accident.” It can generate the exact blur of a street scene, the precise imperfection of motion, the rare light of a sunrise. When the unrepeatable moment can be manufactured at scale, the value of having “been there” no longer resides in the frame itself. It rests entirely on the photographer’s integrity, not on the visual uniqueness of the image. Authenticity stops being a visual property and becomes an ethical one.
Professionalism no longer lives inside the average. It moves outside it, toward specificity and forms of judgment that resist statistical optimization. If “right” becomes the goal, the machine has already won. At that point, correctness turns cheap. Execution stops being decisive. Judgment becomes the differentiator.
Visual Literacy and the Collapse of the Alibi
This is where taste becomes critical. AI can improve images, but it does not refine judgment. Composition as the ability to hold a whole together, color as embodied visual memory, and sensitivity to rhythm, pause, and scale remain outside automation. These are not techniques; they are forms of visual judgment. This is where photography reconnects with artistic thinking, not as aspiration, but as a functional requirement.
Visual literacy stops functioning as background knowledge and becomes operational. AI was trained on visual history and operates within that language. To direct it meaningfully, a photographer must understand the same grammar—not names and dates, but the logic behind decisions and the reasons certain forms endure. Without this, the photographer does not think visually; they only react to output.
This marks a historical reversal. Figures like Ansel Adams used technique to reintroduce thinking into photography, turning control over exposure and print into a way of seeing deliberately rather than automatically. The algorithm now provides the eye. What it does not provide is the mind.
AI is a supercar. Visual literacy is the rules of the road.
The division in the profession no longer runs between those who accept AI and those who reject it. It runs between photographers with an aesthetic foundation and those who never developed one. The former use tools deliberately. The latter produce increasingly smooth, fast, and empty output. AI does not introduce this division; it exposes it.
For decades, technical complexity functioned as an alibi. Lighting setups, hours of retouching, expensive software, and rare technical knowledge lowered the threshold of evaluation. Effort substituted for intention, and process stood in for meaning. We lived in a state of instrumental confidence. The industry taught us to confuse mastery of friction with artistic maturity. Because a task was difficult, we assumed it was meaningful.
AI turns the light on. When complex results no longer require complex paths, effort stops functioning as proof. Technical effort is no longer a proxy for artistic value. What remains must be carried by the image itself.
Many are not mourning photography or the profession. They are mourning the realization that part of their authority rested on complexity rather than necessity.
The Zone of Refusal
In a market where competent images are infinite, value shifts from production to selection. This is where mastery changes definition. In an environment of unlimited production, the decisive skill becomes refusal. The old question focused on what else could be done to an image: more contrast, more clarity, cleaner skin, better skies. The new question shifts toward restraint, asking what should not be done so the image does not lose what made it worth stopping for.
This is why contemporary photography increasingly embraces natural light, visible grain, unresolved frames, and restraint—not as nostalgia and not as style, but as a response to algorithmic uniformity. Photography moves from the effort of making to the courage of choosing. What is made is infinite. What is chosen is accountable. Style no longer emerges from accumulation; it emerges from maintained limits.
This moment is not new. In 1888, George Eastman introduced the Kodak camera with the slogan “You press the button, we do the rest.” Artists at the time declared photography the death of art because labor disappeared from the process. The pattern repeats. Each technological shift that absorbs effort forces meaning back onto the maker. Kodak+1
When labor is automated, responsibility becomes the work. What disappears is not craft, but the ability to hide behind it.
AI doesn’t take photographers’ futures away. It takes their excuses.
7 Comments
Technical qualities in an image are visual. Composition, selection and arrangement of elements, what to include in the frame, what to exclude, how light connects the elements, are all visual evidence of a photographer's skill. Judgement, intention and all forms of thought are not visual. They manifest in the outward form of composition, but literally don't appear as pixels. They make for better words. The viewer may or may not recognize your thoughts and emotions from looking at one of your pictures, but they can see skill.
It seems fashionable these days for that standard of excellence, based on skill, to be mocked by those who rely on emotional intention, and calling something art is used as an excuse for bad photography. Whether AI can think or create something original has little bearing on my photography. What it can do makes no difference in my approach to what I do. With all of the advancement in software and tools which make my work less exclusive, there's a natural anxiety about what separates my images from the masses of less skilled photographers and AI operators. Maybe nothing. Indeed, the digital camera has already decimated the value of what was once the professional's domain. Our best of intentions might never prevent photography from becoming a commodity.
But moving the focus from technical skill to thought and intention merely serves to further erode photography, not save it. Photography is not painting. Whether it's a legitimate form of art depends on how broadly you define art. But trying to reimagine photography from its original purpose (which is to capture light and subject matter) to thought and ideas, distracts from the importance of visual elements and composition that define a photograph. It's my objective to make skilled images, and forget about what the competition, including AI, is doing. Competition and the impact of new technology has no limits, so why chase a moving target? Strive for excellence in your craft and let the world evolve as it will. Short-sighted? Perhaps, but committed to my essential belief in photography which prioritzes light, composition and detail.
I’m not arguing against skill, composition, or visual discipline. Those remain essential to photography.
The point of the text is that technical competence no longer functions as a reliable differentiator, because it has become widely reproducible.
Skill still matters, but it no longer explains why one image stands out while another doesn’t. That distinction now has to come from elsewhere.
I understood what you were saying in your article... and my point in response is that I believe there is no "elsewhere" in matters of photographic distinction. A picture is still nothing more than a picture. You seem to be proposing the idea that the best or only way to differentiate your work is by what you say about it... titles, descriptions, words. Or you can convince the viewer that your image, standing on its own, really is somehow unique... which it is not. As if judgement and intentions on the part of the photographer translate into value, or serve in some way to differentiate one image from another. Good luck with that. If you can convince a gallery that a banana duct-taped to the wall is art, then you are a snake-oil salesman, not an artist. Which is not to say that serious money can not be made as a snake-oil salesman (or bad photography), but, again, it is not art.
In my opinion, the value of photography still resides in the skill of the photographer... his ability to capture the essence of the subject through effective composition and technical quality. I will not abandon that priority for anything else, because anything else is a distraction from what distinguishes photography from all other art forms.
For what it's worth, I opened a Fine Art America account a few days ago. In using some of the keywords I had assigned my images as a search, FAA returned roughly a thousand matches. Nothing is entirely unique. But something else sort of surprised me, which was that the large majority were pretty bad photography by technical standards. So while there are all kinds of tools for enabling people to make better images with less skill and experience, there's still a glut of really bad stuff to where quality images stand out. I don't believe that easy-to-use software has changed the marketplace for photography to such a degree that differentiation from "elsewhere" needs to supplant quality.
I think this is where we’re talking about two different ways of evaluating work that don’t translate into each other. One is literal and skill-based, where value comes from craft, execution, and how well something is made. The other is symbolic, where value comes from what a gesture represents, not how perfectly it is executed.
Comedian (a banana taped to a wall by Maurizio Cattelan), or Malevich’s Black Square, don’t claim value through technical mastery. Their value isn’t in where the banana is taped or how perfect the square is, but in what they symbolize. That doesn’t make them “better” than a perfectly painted apple, but it places them in a different system of meaning.
These are simply different worlds with different criteria. Trying to judge one using the standards of the other is like evaluating the grammar of a language while only knowing a completely different one. Everything will look wrong, even if nothing actually is.
"I think this is where we’re talking about two different ways of evaluating work that don’t translate into each other. "
I realize we're speaking two different languages by approaching photography two different ways. I just think it's unfortunate when photography – under attack from AI and technology that appears to diminish focus on photographic skill and experience – retreats into symbolic gestures on par with a banana duct-taped to the wall. The beauty of photography lies in the camera lens's unique capacity to capture detail that painting and other art forms can not. Technical skill may not protect my work from AI, but I choose not to let AI alter my language of photography either.
I agree that these pressures are real. My writing overall is an attempt to think through these questions, not to ignore or evade them.
I see plenty of technically good photographs, which tells me something about the technical skillset of the photographer but the photos themselves are still predictable and boring.