Jonah Goldman Kay (https://jonahgoldmankay.com/) interviewed me for an article about the history of the selfie for Google.
“A brief history of the selfie” with some of my remarks from the interview:
Read it on the Google website
or download a PDF here
Most of our conversation remains in the background, as the genre of the article is more tech-forward. But we had a wonderful and inspiring discussion about photography, and here I’m just sharing one fragment of it:
Jonah: I like the way you place modernist photographic techniques in conversation with Gen Z photographers. Can you say a bit more about how these trends allow a sort of experimentation? I'm particularly curious if developments in the quality of photographs take on mobile phone (and the rise of AI tools) could encourage experimentation?
Alise: We can observe some parallels in how new tools facilitate or inspire new ways of using them. But I wouldn’t want to go in the direction of technological determinism, as the relationship between new creative and technological developments is not so straightforward.
For example, there is much said about how the early Leica cameras in the 1920s liberated the photographer, opened up all these new and unexpected viewpoints, and created new genres such as street photography which all were simply not possible with heavier and clumsier equipment. The new type of camera – the lightweight and highly portable 35mm film camera indeed encouraged people to make new kinds of images. But there were numerous other social and cultural factors that coincided with the appearance of new photo equipment and no doubt contributed to shaping, for example, the “New Vision” aesthetics or Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” approach to documentary photography.
Now, in the 2020s, we could say that today’s new tools, especially generative AI, also encourage people to make new kinds of images, and, in a broader sense, foster experimental spirit. By “experimental” here I mean that the outcome may be unknown, unexpected, or unpredictable. Most AI-generated images that I have seen, however, are not so much experimental as they are retrospective and nostalgic. So, for example, generative AI now can quite well emulate the look of photographic images, including very specific details like lighting, depth of field, bokeh, and lens flare effects, and also specific historical techniques such as daguerreotype, tintype, and so on. While emulation or simulation of other media is an important part of the history of photography (just think of the pictorialists and their desire to make photographs that looked like drawings, paintings, or etchings!), this process is not the same as creating radically new types of images that we hadn’t seen or imagined before. Some artists are going in that direction, such as Refik Anadol, but great work also has been done in the nostalgic direction, such as the AI-generated family album photos by Maria Mavroupolou.
Click on the image below to read the published article!
