AI Art and Photography - the 'Missed Shot'

AI- generated art. Loved by some, hated by many more - which undoubtedly has made it one of the most controversial topics in art circles. 

Well, at least on social media where everybody has an opinion to give.

Only 4 years ago, 'AI art' was little more than using machine algorithms to enhance images, to reduce blur and crispen the edges of a photograph of a long-lost relative. That and the stupid glee of Dall-e mini, a - for lack of a better word, toy - that would spit out four pint-sized barely recognizable images of 'Yoda at a nightclub' or 'Michael Jackson chased by Godzilla'.

Things have made a scarily drastic change since those days. Now there are AI videos of imaginary people with fluid and dynamic movement, near-indistinguishable fake images of, for instance, a solemn-looking veteran asking for likes, which fool tens of thousands of Facebook boomers daily. If one is aware and keen-eyed, you may just be able to spot the inconsistencies which give away the picture's non-sentient creator. 

I'm not trying to make the claim here that all AI art is an affront to god, nor that it should all come to a halt. There's a particular Instagram account which I love by the name of @deadtempovisions, whose creator uses the uncanny and confusing nature of AI videos to bring to life eerie, horrifying dreamscapes of twisting forests filled with hideous deformed beasts. It's content that without the availability of generative image making would be far too inaccessible to anybody without a background in animation. In this sense, I can give Artificial Intelligence a pass.

But the topic of capturing something that would be otherwise impossible to do is the very focus of what I'm writing today. 

Greg Girard is a Canadian photographer, one whose work in capturing scenes of daily life in and around Asia I have always adored. Beginning in the mid-70s and continuing to this day, his images exploring Tokyo, Shanghai, Seoul and many more evoke a wonderful noire feel. The contrast of labor and leisure, seedy clubs around Kabukicho, hostesses in cocktail bars, advertising billboards reflecting on rain-soaked streets, all breathtakingly illustrate the impact that the explosion of Western influence has had on culture and city life across the Far East. As a young man in Vancouver he brought to life the streets of his hometown and in the late 1970s, at the age of just 21, he began a journey to Japan which would define his life's work from that point forwards. 

In my opinion Girard is one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century. The topic of this post is his work in Hong Kong in the 1980s; specifically in Kowloon walled city, the infamous forbidden fortress whose existence defined the small exclave for as long as it existed.

A few weeks ago Greg Girard posted on his Instagram regarding an upcoming photo exhibition - one showcasing his work inside the walled city along with a myriad of other artists. The first slide stood out to me as very intriguing. It reads as follows,

"I was walking on Tung Tau Tsuen road in from of the Walled City when I saw her get out of a taxi. She was wearing a red Cathay Pacific uniform and pulling a small suitcase. To my surprise she headed into the Walled City. Could it be: a Cathay Stewardess living inside the Kowloon Walled City? I raced to follow her but lost her in the maze of alleyways. I've never forgotten that, and wondered what it might have looked like: the photograph I never took."

The next image in the post is one unmistakably in the style of Girard's photographs. A young woman in a deep scarlet stewardess' uniform looks intently into the lens of the camera as she walks down a dark and fluorescent-lit corridor, in the Kowloon walled city. Her gaze is piercing, the contrast between her perfectly pressed Cathay Pacific blazer and the grimy concrete walls behind dazzlingly poignant. I loved the piece, another hallmark of Girard's snapshots of Hong Kong life. But then it occurred to me - didn't he say he missed the shot? That he lost her in the maze of alleyways?

Yes, he did. And the second image is an AI-generated mockup.

This is the point where a question raises its head - to what extent is AI generation OK to be used in art, especially in photography? 

Do I hate AI art? Not all of it, as I said before. It has its place, to weave stories that simply aren't possible to recreate even with a vision, and background in the arts. For the videos spat out by Midjourney are grotesque and twisting, something that could only be conjured by a clumsy computer - which gives those visions such a dreamlike quality. Yet in this context, I can't help but feel a little uncomfortable by the melding in with photography. 

I wrote a few weeks ago about what makes photography an art in my vision, that you're capturing life in action, a fraction of time which can never be lived through again. When painting is about creating something, photography is about finding something. A vision of life that you and your little handheld machine took a momentary impression of.

The very point of the exhibition Girard is promoting is (as an Instagram commenter points out, quite ironically) 'The importance of preserving collective memory through photography'. To convey the daily life of those who called Hong Kong and the Walled City home. Girard laments on missing that shot of the stewardess entering Kowloon, which I too identify with so very deeply. There are countless photographs I have missed, that exist only in my memory - times when my lens cap was on, or the camera was just out of battery altogether. Just last week I had my camera in hand when a Shinto priest rode toward me down an alleyway on a moped - white helmet and sunglasses, his robe fluttering behind in the wind. By the time I'd raised my camera, that's it. He was gone.

I feel that a photographer, you should come to terms with the fact that you can't capture everything. Sometimes you have to let a moment pass by as a leaf in the breeze. You saw it, you remember it, but you can't have it. As humans, we have a thirst for knowledge - what secrets did the library of Alexandria hold? What did those lost paintings, poems, stories of old contain within themselves?

A Soviet film from 1933, 'The Tale of the Priest and of his Workman Balda' immediately comes to mind when I think about this. A beautiful, bizarre experimental paper-animated film from husband-and-wife Mikhail and Vera Tsekhanovskaya; it was their life's work, and it was almost entirely destroyed during the bombing of Leningrad in 1941. Just 3 minutes of footage remain. The rest is forever, always lost. What I would give to see that film in its entirety! But I know, I can't. I can never see what those animators painstakingly put together for years, hunched in dark studios to make paper dance and burst with song.

I would also love to see the shot of the stewardess which Greg Girard missed, but again, I cannot. It was a moment lost forever to time. To see the recreation made with AI...I don't hate it. Nor am I wildly disgusted, or frustrated by its mere existence. But I do feel that it warps the very meaning of taking that photograph. My worry which grows deeper each year is that AI imaging software is becoming too 'good' for us to discern from reality. Even I was fooled by the 'what if' image posted by Girard, before I went back and double-checked. When AI can be used to bring back a photograph lost to time in such a way, and create the perfect mimicry of a photography master's work - how long until it's used to create imaginary stills from photographers long-since passed? Perfect and life-like resurrections of a scene that never happened, from a camera that doesn't exist. It totally undermines the unbelievably hard work that goes into creating art. The 'blood, sweat and tears' of the person behind the art.

For a photographer, the frustration of a missed opportunity, the despair of misframing a shot of underexposing their film. Giving up, getting angry, failing for years on end, trying again. That's what makes any art special. To type words into a search bar and have a computer program copy thousands of images to render an imaginary scene - it's far too easy! A photographer has to understand what it means to deal with light leakage, under exposure, out-of-focus shots, all of which take literally years on end to perfect. For an AI to do all of that in an instant, and form a scene that never existed with no passion or creativity, takes away all the meaning of a human's work.

The stewardess Girard describes was a real woman whose identity will likely never be found. Her and the 'perfect shot' vanished into the dim alleyways of the walled city one day in the late 1980s. The recreation of that 'lost image' is not her, nor is it even the walled city. It is not that scene, it's something that never happened. 

I would not want to see an AI recreation of 'The Tale of the Priest and of his Workman Balda', because it undermines the very work of the animators who toiled to make such a thing into a reality. And it says to the artists, animators, and photographers of the future,

"Why bother?"