What Makes You a Photographer When 5 Billion Photos Are Taken Every Day?

Roughly 5 billion photos are taken every day, and anyone with a Midjourney account can now produce an image that looks interesting in seconds. With volume that high and a barrier that low, it becomes a practical question whether your own pictures carry anything that someone else's don't.

Max Kent starts with AI image generation. Kent says most of his own enjoyment of photography sits in the process of making a picture, while prompt-based images are almost entirely about the outcome. He calls having an idea the bare minimum for any creative person. The hard part is having the skill, life experience, and vision to get that idea out of your head and into a frame. He also points out how often prompters copy one another, stacking imitation on imitation built from work that real photographers made first. His label for the prompter is "curator," someone assembling a look from images pulled off Pinterest or Instagram.

From there, Kent turns to identity, and he's careful not to make it a requirement. He contrasts the feed of nice towers and nice streets with flipping through a photo book by someone you admire. The feed pictures rarely stay with you. In the book, every frame feels like it belongs to one person. He also pushes back on the idea that you only become a photographer once you go professional or sell work, pointing to photographers whose bodies of work went unseen for decades before anyone recognized them. A few years ago, Kent felt lost with photography. He went through long stretches of barely shooting and feeling bad about it. He found his way back by studying the photographers who inspired him alongside his own archive, then writing down a handful of words to guide him. The effect he describes is specific. He stopped taking the dutiful picture of whatever landmark sat in front of him when he arrived somewhere new.

Camera makers have spent the last few years working on a related problem from the hardware side. The Leica M11-P arrived in 2023 as the first camera with Content Credentials built in. Content Credentials is a standard backed by Adobe's Content Authenticity Initiative that records where an image came from and how it was edited. Sony has since brought similar authenticity features to several of its bodies. That work can show a real camera captured a file. It can't show whether the person holding it had something to say, and that question sits entirely with you. Kent's method is one you can try this week. Look through the photos you keep returning to, yours and other people's, and pick three or four words that describe what they share. Write them down and carry them on your next outing. If your words are "quiet" and "texture," a famous landmark becomes a reason to study the worn stone up close or walk the empty side street next to it. The list does its job when it makes you skip a picture you would have taken on autopilot.

Kent also separates casual shooting from the committed kind through intention. By intention, he means leaving the house planning to photograph something, whether that's a city, street life, or wherever you happen to be. Shooting that way makes you notice more. You see small moments, other ways to compose the same scene, and what you actually want the image to say. He ties intention back to identity and argues that your temperament leaks into your frames. Nervous or confident, introverted or outgoing, you'll avoid certain things and run toward others, and the pictures record those choices. He then takes on the worry that every subject has already been photographed thousands of times. He uses a celebrated street photographer's snowy city scenes as proof that a familiar subject can still feel like a memory when the right person frames it.

Kent's full argument is in the video above.