I’m happy to announce that I’ve just received the Guggenheim Fellowship to work with photographer Stephen Ferry on our project Black Mirror Colombia.

I was recently in a lengthy and intense online video conversation with German theoretician and artist Hito Steyerl centering on the politics and problematics of AI-generated imagery.

“Exiting the Photographic Universe,” the title of our discussion, is featured on Carrier Bag, an innovative technology-centric research site for Emergent Digital Media at AdBK Munich. A full-length transcript is available there as well.

Lecture Series:

The 3-part lecture series, Toward Authentic Visual Narratives in an Age of Menace and Confusion (Thursdays, 1-3 pm ET), will cover: Images and Ideas: An Introduction (20 November), Image‑based Strategies for Social Change (4 December), and Impactful Imagery in the Age of AI (18 December).

The lectures are open to all, with all proceeds ($10 suggested, $1 minimum donation) going to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Two Masterclasses:

The two five-week masterclasses, Innovative Strategies for Exploring the Human Condition (Wednesdays, Feb 11–Mar 11, 2026) and Advancing the Personal Project for Social and Individual Change (Wednesdays, Mar 25–Apr 29, 2026), will offer an opportunity for image-makers from around the world to work in a small-group setting.

Admission for masterclasses is by application, due January 5, 2026. Limited scholarships are available.

Please check StrudelmediaLive for more information and registration.

The Synthetic Eye: Photography Transformed in the Age of AI by Fred Ritchin

A revelatory glimpse into the future of photography, one where the very nature of how images are created is fundamentally transformed by artificial intelligence. An invaluable roadmap in a new world.

The revolution caused by artificial intelligence in terms of what a photograph can and cannot do is profound. This book looks at photography’s strengths, what it has meant for individuals and for society, its massive transformations caused by a variety of factors in the digital age, and the newer possibilities for image making. These include old and new media, with an emphasis on synthetic imaging as both a positive and terrifying development.

In 1840, a year after photography’s invention, the painter Paul Delaroche exclaimed, “From now on, painting is dead.” Photography was quicker and cheaper as a representational medium and more realistic, its invention also liberated painters to become much more adventurous, embracing approaches that included impressionism, cubism, minimalism, and abstract expressionism. So too photographers are being challenged today. Many have responded with new strategies, but more innovation is needed. Can photographers be as radically expansive and revolutionary as painters were? Can they preserve or even expand the photograph’s role in society as a credible witness? Can the photographic image morph into forms previously unimagined?

The Synthetic Eye is about this transformative revolution. How can synthetic imagery be utilized to amplify our understanding of ourselves and our worlds? Can an alternative photography deepen and expand the medium’s previous reach? What are the pitfalls? How will our senses of the real, the possible, and the actual be affected?

Receive 25% off the cover price plus free shipping on your copy of The Synthetic Eye.

Enter Promo Code SYNEYE25 at checkout when you shop at https://wwnorton.com/books/9780500297391 or use this QR code (discount valid through March 31, 2025)

In a world unsettled by “deepfakes,” politicians, voters, and journalists are struggling to navigate increasingly prevalent versions of unreality.

Just over 50 years ago, President Richard Nixon privately wondered if the photograph of Kim Phuc, a nine-year-old Vietnamese girl whose body was burning from napalm, had been staged. He said to his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, “I wonder if that was a fix”—what now might be called “fake news.” But given the credibility in 1972 of news photography, Nixon was unable to dismiss the horror that this photo by the AP’s Nick Ut evoked, even as it stoked resistance to the war.

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For those of us on the outside, the “fog of war” is beginning to resemble a total eclipse of the sun.

With the contraction of print publications, the front pages of newspapers and the covers of newsmagazines have essentially disappeared, no longer providing a unifying focus. With a multitude of people, political factions, and organizations weaponizing media, using fake or misleading imagery in a parallel media war, viewers have been left largely in the dark, not knowing with whom to empathize, their tribal loyalties reinforced. And now, with increasing skepticism fueled by the emergence of artificial intelligence systems capable of simulating conventional media, the photographs and videos that actually depict the conflict between Hamas and Israel are more and more considered suspect.

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In 1984, when photographers were still using film, I began exploring the early use of computers to undetectably modify photographs. In an article in The New York Times Magazine I wrote that “in the not-too-distant future, realistic-looking images will probably have to be labeled, like words, as either fiction or nonfiction, because it may be impossible to tell them apart. We may have to rely on the image maker, and not the image, to tell us into which category certain pictures fall.”

This was two years after National Geographic, at the dawn of the digital image revolution, had modified a photograph of the pyramids of Giza so that it would better fit on its cover, using a computer to shift one pyramid closer to the other. The magazine’s editor defended the alteration, viewing it not as a falsification but, as I wrote then, “merely the establishment of a new point of view, as if the photographer had been retroactively moved a few feet to one side.” I was astonished. It seemed to me that the magazine had just introduced to photography a concept from science fiction—virtual time travel—as if revisiting a scene and photographing it again.

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Rather than a recording of the visible that shows aspects of the world around us that may not be in accord with our preconceptions, software will allow us to reshape the digital photograph to conform to what we want the world to look like. For example, an exhibition on display in Ashkelon, Israel, shows synthetic, quasi photo-realistic images that were produced to represent the memories of elderly Holocaust survivors recounting traumatic memories from their childhood some eight decades before. It was done, as the organizers put it, to remember this horrific era in human history. But does this method also encourage forgetting? How will future generations be able to discern the difference between the lens-based visual record compiled by photographers and filmmakers versus the photo-realistic imagery that is based upon explicitly subjective memories? The past becomes increasingly uncertain, as does the present. What will become of the photographic record? What, if anything, can be done about it? 

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