Digital Photography After AI

How AI-generated images radically alter our interactions with photography as well as our understanding of it.

In recent years, artificial intelligence technologies have made it easy for anyone to produce images that look indistinguishable from photographs. How do these AI-generated images change our understanding of photography? Should we consider them photography at all? In Digital Photography After AI, Amanda Wasielewski explores these questions as well as the historical and theoretical concerns for the field of photography after the widespread uptake of AI tools.

The book connects AI-generated photographs to a longer trajectory of the history of photography, from Henry Fox Talbot in the nineteenth century through Surrealism and the mid-twentieth century of media to more recent times, including camera phone photography and social media. The author addresses AI-generated images in terms of the technique, form, and function of photography throughout its history, as well as the documentary function of photography, image resolution and filter effects, the surreal and real quality of photographs and AI-generated images, and the latter’s impact on representation and illusion.