Postcards from my sofa
In lieu of an essay; photographs.
Firstly, apologies for the tardiness of this week’s Urban Nature Diary - I’ve been flat on my back with a flu this week unable to focus on much other than my Xbox.
The nights are beginning to draw in, there is a definite bite in the air, so in the absence of an essay I’ll instead share some moments to celebrate the passing of the summer.
I bought a new camera recently. It’s an upgrade to a mirrorless system from my 13-year-old entry-level DSLR I’ve been rocking for over a decade.
I always hesitate over big purchases like that, not least because I don’t actually make my living out of photography. I’ve always dabbled in it, and always enjoyed it, but I am by no means a professional photographer.
I just felt like I had outgrown my current system and I wanted something that could also plug into the way I shoot video (which I do make a living from) so a camera with hybrid stills and video functionality seemed to me a sensible direction.
Any form of image capture is all about shaping light. You can shoot something on the highest end Hollywood-grade cinema camera but if your subject is under a washed-out fluorescent light it’s not going to look great. To really step up the quality of any video or photography the artist is better off investing in good quality lights, wraps, eggcrates and all that other kind of kit before upgrading the camera or the lens.
But documentary photography and videography is a slightly different beast. For me, that comes down to noticing. Taking advantage of the way the natural light is hitting at a certain time in a certain place.
It’s about finding a way to capture spontanteous moments that prompt a question, or invoke an emotion, or tell a story.
On a practical level, I could question why I take photos at all if I’m not a professional photographer. Smartphone cameras are great these days, and I carry one with me all the time. Do I need to spend my savings on something I’ll never get a financial return on?
But then I could ask the same about anything I do. Why write this newsletter every week? Why create the short film I spent the first half of this year making? I won’t get my money back from either of those things, yet I still feel compelled to create, and hone my craft.
Generative AI is still dominating the topic of conversation whenever I have the misfortune to open LinkedIn. Most of it is themed around the benefits of being able to create ‘high-quality’ imagery, video and text in mere moments, doing away with the need for artists’ time (and invoices).
AI envangelists work with the presumption that the time it takes to create something is an obstacle that needs to be overcome. That the only difference between an artist and a non-artist is the years the artist spent honing a craft, which can now be achieved with the simple push of a button, democratising the act of creation and increasing productivity.
There’s that toxic word again: productivity. The notion that everything must feed the eternally hungry machine of GDP.
Malcolm Gladwell popularised the theory that expertise comes from 10,000 hours of practice. The artists and writers and craftspeople and athletes at the absolute top of their game are those who have invested time and patience and dedication into their field of choice. Today it seems the main reason people are championing generative AI is so they can do away with those 10,000 hours, lazily hit a button and call it their own work.
Perhaps it’s born from a world in which infinite hours of entertainment are available at the touch of a finger on our devices. Or in which you can order anything you can possibly imagine, from anywhere in the world, direct to your doorstep within a day. I once worked with someone who watched films on double speed and read the subtitles just so he could could finish them quicker. The other day I came across a YouTube channel that made videos summarising the plots of books in a few minutes. It had many thousands of subscribers.
Perhaps we have simply been spoiled with such an abundance of stuff for so long we have completely detached ourselves from what it takes to make it, and what it means to appreciate it. This goes for the cheap crap we fill our homes with that comes with the catastrophic human and environmental cost of resource overextraction, and this goes for art. We think that human culture is simply a factory conveyor belt of content to consume, and by generating it using AI we can cut out the hours of creation and get to the point of it: the consumption.
But no matter how good generative AI might become in future years, it will only ever be a replication. It might look like a photograph, or a painting, or an animation, but it won’t feel like one. Because AI can’t feel. AI has never experienced heartbreak, or loss, or the feel of the cold sea lapping at its feet. AI has never heard birdsong, has never watched the sun rise pale and yellow after spending a night out with friends, has never gone to bed with calloused hands after a long day of carving wood. AI has no stories to tell of its own. And it never will.
I am by no means saying that my creative work says something profound about the human condition, or that my photos are worthy of much more than a cursory glance. But I find solace in the act of observation and documentation and I hope it goes at least some way to conveying emotion.
There’s a reason you subscribe to this newsletter and read it each week. I don’t know what that is, and I wouldn’t dare to guess. But I would bet everything that if I prompted an AI to write it every week and include artificially generated images of fabulous things, you would unsubscribe in a heartbeat. Even if it looked like my work and sounded like my work (or was even better).
Because humans strive connection, not content. They seek emotion, not consumption.
I opened this week’s post by saying I didn’t have anything to say, but it turned out I did have something to say and now I’m getting stern looks because I need to go out soon and I’m still sitting on the sofa.
But thank you for reading my human words and looking at my human photographs and if anything spoke to you I’d love to hear from you. My inbox is always open.
Let’s connect.
In other news…
I’m trying to get better at tooting my own horn so I’m obliged to leave you with news that my film The Birdwatchers won the Environmental Awareness Award at Greenwich Film Festival here in London last week.
I put a lot of time into making it and it’s thrilling to hear that it has resonated with audiences. I’ll share it here soon in the coming weeks so keep an eye out for that.
The creative adventure, the nuts and bolts as well as the ecstacy of inspiration, cannot be equaled. That's why we do it. That's why I enjoyed reading about your camera even though I'm a painter. I could relate. AI seems like more layers of separation.
Totally agree with your take on AI. Have you seen Neal Stephenson's recent post of the subject, here on Substack? He says many of the same things you're saying. Stephen Fry also posted a few weeks ago and said much about the same.
And I also heartily endorse what you say about cameras. As someone who made a fair chunk of my living writing both general photography guides and camera-specific manuals (nearly half of all my published books) I recognise the importance of decent tools, but also that there's no substitute for the heart and mind that uses them. As Ansel Adams, one of the greatest photographers of all time, said, “The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it.”