Kōdō Shimon writing about the rise in AI ‘Street Photography’

Street photography isn’t just about getting images. It’s about being present in the world, engaging with fellow humans, finding the courage to put yourself in uncomfortable situations.

I should preface my thoughts on this with the fact that I am not against LLMs’ use as an assistive tool. I do so daily and am a big fan of what they can do for my life and my productivity (yes, I just threw up a bit typing that word out).

What I really hate is the use of AI to create an end product that means absolutely nothing. I have been quite into this, creating supporting images for my blog posts with AI because I thought it was needed, but I quickly realised that it completely misses the point.

The whole point of looking at a photo is because it captures a point in time that happened. I won’t get into the whole “what is a photo?” debate here because photographers can manipulate it, play with colours, and enhance the effects present in the image. But it still happened. At some point, a sensor captured the photo and processed the image of a real-world event.

This is what evokes the emotions. The ability to see the image and reflect on it happening. Otherwise, what is the point? For street photography in particular, this is one of my passions, and creating it artificially defeats the whole purpose of the genre. When I take photos, I want to show the beauty and the art in everyday life. From the small details you miss when you don’t look deeper.

Other street photographers capture moments that may never be repeated. Events and people that are frozen in time as a reference point of things that happened. As pointed out in the post, the use of AI to recreate these types of photos represents

“the collapse of meaning in our rush to simulate experience rather than live it”. The end product is the only concern, producing an image instead of creating a photo. “emulation versus native execution” as Kōdō puts it.

When I take photos, I am engrossed in the world like no other experience can reproduce. It is very much like meditation, enabling me to think about nothing else than spotting beautiful details of everyday life that you may consider mundane. It is an experience, and I like to think that transfers through the resultant image.

Remove all of this out of the process, and it completely misses the point. You get nothing more than a throwaway arrangement of pixels that means absolutely nothing — but then again, forgettable media seems to be what the world revolves around now.