[alwa]

I mean… I have a fancy phone camera in my pocket too, but there are photographers who, with the same model of fancy phone camera, do things that awe and move me.

It took a solid hundred years to legitimate photography as an artistic medium, right? To the extent that the controversy still isn’t entirely dead?

Any cool images I ask AI for are going to involve a lot less patience and refinement than some of these things the kids are using AI to turn out…

For that matter, I’ve watched friends try to ask for factual information from LLMs and found myself screaming inwardly at how vague and counterproductive their style of questioning was. They can’t figure out why I get results I find useful while they get back a wall of hedging and waffling.

[namaria]

> It took a solid hundred years to legitimate photography as an artistic medium, right?

Not really.

"In 1853 the Photographic Society, parent of the present Royal Photographic Society, was formed in London, and in the following year the Société Française de Photographie was founded in Paris."

https://www.britannica.com/technology/photography/Photograph...

[alwa]

Not that photographic art wasn’t getting made, more that the doyens of the Finer Arts would tend to dismiss work in that medium as craft, trade, or low art—that they’d dismiss the act of photographic production as “mere capture” as opposed to creative interpretation, or situate the artistic work in the darkroom afterward where people used hands and brushes and manual aesthetic judgment.

It’s been depressingly long since school, but am I wrong in vaguely remembering the controversy stretching through Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and well into the Warhol era?

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/10/when-photogra...

And I guess legitimacy doesn’t fully depend on the whims of museums and collectors, but to hear Christie’s tell it, they didn’t start treating the medium as fine art until 1972–and then, almost more as antiquities than as works of art—

https://www.christies.com/en/stories/how-photography-became-...

In much the same way as there are tons of Polaroids that are not art and a few that unambiguously are (e.g. [0]); there’s a lot of lazy AI imagery, but there also seem to be some unambiguously artful endeavors (e.g. [1]), no?

[0] https://stephendaitergallery.com/exhibitions/dawoud-bey-pola...

[1] https://www.clairesilver.com/