[perihelions]

I mean, career photography is itself just an automation of a manual creative task, that of portraiture painting. A thing that replaced the careers of a large number of professional artists with faster, more efficient, machines; and a smaller number of professionals operating those machines.

[SoftTalker]

Yes and no. For portraiture, sure. But photography also made it possible to capture images that would be totally impractical to do with painting or drawing. Sports action, as one example. Photojournalism in general, though in certain niches drawing/painting is still done (e.g. in some courtrooms).

And there was still a lot of human skill involved in film photography: timing the shot, framing the shot, selecting the proper lens, exposure time, focus, depth of field, film speed. And then processing the film, and making the prints.

Current photography has removed almost all skill requirements. AI can remove distracting background elements, crop, enhance, blur, whatever you want. Therefore as art, it's not very interesting.

[fengjiabo2400]

That's a good historical perspective. What's different though is the profession is replaced by ONLY machines, no humans.

Even vibe coding requires human engineers to oversee otherwise there is no point. But photography is different, since the customer can bypass the producer and get the final output directly.