Is it art? Am I an artist?
Artist self-portrait created via Midjourney
To answer the second question first . . . sort of? My background is as a journalist and media strategist, having spent many years working as a newspaper reporter and editor and then later as a public interest communicator for nonprofit organizations. I'm a (mostly) self-taught photographer; I bought my first DSLR in 2004. Today, I work as a commissioned photographer, shooting corporate and nonprofit gigs, portraits and family sessions. I also organize and run travel photography workshops. I'm part of the local art scene – I founded an annual photo festival in the nation’s capital, I’ve edited and published three collaborative photo books (a fourth is underway), I’ve curated photo exhibits and projections. My photography has been exhibited in group shows and has won awards. I’ve made photographs that I feel are artistic, if not actual works of art. I don’t know if all this qualifies me as an artist. Maybe, I’m just “artist adjacent.”
As far as the first question, “is it art?” That gets a lot more complicated. If “it” refers to images created using generative text-to-image artificial intelligence software, the answer is definitively, yes. The best images that I’ve seen created via software such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and Dalle-E 2 are intricate, thought-provoking and evocative. They are as much works of art as if they had been painted with a brush, chiseled out of stone or captured with an electronic sensor.
But is the person who created a piece of art using Midjourney an artist? Not necessarily. Calling someone who generates an artistic image by entering a string of text is like calling someone who googles the location of the Mu Cang Chai Rice Terraces a geographer. The act of inputing data, itself, doesn’t make you an artist, but it doesn’t disqualify you from being one, either. I do think there’s a certain “art” in creating generative images.
To delve into this discussion, I turned to a decidedly non-expert pundit to weigh the pros and cons of the “Is it Art” debate. Me. Yes, I’m doing a Q&A with myself. It’s a little unconventional but everything about emerging art and technology is unconventional, until it’s not (more on that in a bit.)
An AI-generated dragon sitting above the Mu Cang Chai Rice Terraces in northwestern Vietnam.
Most Sublime: Let’s get the obvious question out of the way first: Is it just a little bit weird to be having this conversation with yourself?
Joe Newman: Absolutely, not. I’ve been having these discussions with myself a lot. It’s actually a relief to be getting these thoughts out of my head and onto paper, er, text.
MS: How long have you been creating generative art?
JN: Again, I’m not sure I would call what I’ve been creating art. I messed around with a couple iPhone apps over the summer when it seemed everyone was doing it, but I didn’t get too serious about generative art until recently. I’ve probably generated a dozen “final” images, though each of those required working through dozens of variations.
MS: What do you like about it? Or to be more blunt, what’s the point of it all?
JN: It’s fun, first of all. It’s fun watching an image take shape based on the prompts you enter. There doesn’t really have to be any other reason than that . . .
MS: But . . .
JN: Ah, yes, but I think generative art will have a major impact on how we communicate visually both in the near term and long-term future. We’re still at the cusp of it, as far, as where it’s becoming accessible to the every-day person. You can see that, despite some really stunning images being created, there’s still a lot of room for the AI to improve. Remember that scene in the original Terminator where Kyle is explaining to Sarah Connor how hard it is to tell terminators apart from humans?
“The 600 series had rubber skin. We spotted them easy, but these are new. They look human ... sweat, bad breath, everything. Very hard to spot.”
The Terminator as generated by Midjourney.
Well, we’re still dealing with the 600 series. The AI does some stuff really well and other stuff, not so much. It has a hard time with eyes. They’re often not symmetrical – different sized eyeballs, eyes that don’t quite line up, colors that don’t match. Then there are fingers, hands and appendages. For whatever reason, it seems the AI can’t grasp the concept of how joints are supposed to bend or how many fingers a human hand is supposed to have. It can be kind of creepy, actually.
But it’s just a matter of time before the AI teaches itself how to do all these things perfectly. Sooner than later, probably. When that happens, when AI advances another level or two, what kind of impact will that have on things like photography and graphic design? Why pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to create a photo shoot for a national advertising campaign? There’s no need to build elaborate sets, pay location costs, hire models and actors, commission a photographer when you can create all that with a computer. Not that we haven’t been able to do that for years with CGI, etc., but now you can do it at a mere fraction of the cost. No expensive production costs, no salaries for digital artists or engineers, just someone skilled at writing prompts.
So, yeah, the point is, I want to learn what this is all about. How is it going to affect my life as a photographer? As a visual storyteller? As a communicator?
But the other point, I’m having a lot of fun creating images, especially portraits. (Check them out on Instagram).
MS: The Oxford dictionary defines an artist as “a person who creates works of art, especially paintings or drawings.” So why aren’t people who create generative art, artists?
JN: I’ve got no problem if someone who creates sophisticated AI art calls themselves an artist. There’s definitely a pride of “creatorship.” Is that a word? I sometimes have to remind myself that I didn’t actually make those portraits, computer software did. How much pride am I allowed to take in them?
I definitely participated in the process. I did guide the evolution of the image by telling the AI which direction to take the work. Someone else entering the same text prompts might take it a completely different direction and end up with a vastly different final product. So, there is a human-machine collaborative process taking place.
Still, I’m always a little hesitant to use the term “artist” to describe myself. It’s probably a little bit of imposter syndrome – that my photography or digital art isn’t good enough. That an art critic, or someone better at photography than me, can easily expose my flaws.
There has always been a level of elitism when it comes to art that makes me uncomfortable. Definitely so when it comes to photography.
Do you remember the HDR craze in the late 2000s? A lot of landscape photographers, many who had brand new digital cameras, were smitten with HDR, or High Dynamic Range. You could use software to turn a dull scene into a stunning, hyper-realistic landscape. The HDR method of stacking multiple images of varying exposures allowed you to pull incredible details out of the shadows. The resulting images were often beautiful but it was also obvious that they had been heavily processed.
When the HDR process was done to an extreme, the images were garish, overcooked hellscapes. There were a lot of photography purists who looked down their noses at anyone who produced HDR images. There were debates about whether HDR images could qualify as documentary photos because of the heavy post-processing involved. Some even argued that HDR was defiling how we see the world. A silly argument really when you consider that we are manipulating reality the moment we start setting exposure, shutter speed and ISO on our cameras.
But now, 15 years later, you don’t hear a peep about HDR because it is built into our cameras. The dynamic range on camera sensors is so advanced, that they are now performing the same functions “in camera” that you had to do with computer software back in 2007. Today, you can use programs, such as Adobe’s Lightroom, to easily pull details out of the shadows, sharpen the edges, pump up the vibrancy and adjust the saturation, in ways similar to what the old HDR techniques used to accomplish.
I think there are some parallels to what we’re seeing today with AI-generated art. It’s like we’re back in those early, free-wheeling days of HDR gone wild.
MS: If I recall, you were pretty obsessed with HDR back in the day.
JN: Dude, really? Ok, I admit, I was into it. I used to see these images on Flickr and wonder why the photos I was taking didn’t look like that. I came to realize that there was a lot of post-processing going on; it made me want to learn how to do it.
The really wild thing is that one of the first big HDR gurus was this photographer named Trey Ratcliff, who posted his images on Flickr and on his travel blog, Stuck in Customs (maybe, he should call it, “Stuck in 2010,” since it doesn’t look like it has changed much in the last 15 years).
Anyways, Trey built up a huge following and was probably personally responsible for inspiring a large part of the tidal wave of HDR landscape images that swept across our social media feeds.
I actually got a chance to meet Trey once when he came through DC on a national photo meetup tour. But I hadn’t really kept track of him or followed him much in the last eight years or so.
As it turns out, Trey is really into AI art. He’s posting his work on Instagram at @triaratcliff. He’s pretty prolific and, not surprisingly, pretty good at it. Keep your eye on Trey. He’s once again at the tip of the spear. If history teaches us anything, it’s that we’re constantly moving through a repeating cycle. There’s the established way of things, which leads to a new way of things, which, in turn, leads to a revolution, with the new way of doing things eventually becoming the established way. And so it goes.
Welcome to the revolution; this time it will be AI generated.
An “HDR” image generated by Midjourney “in the style of Trey Ratclilff.”
All images on this page were created specifically for this post by Joe Newman using the Midjourney platform. You can receive all my content in your inbox by subscribing to my Substack.
