On Photography and Purpose

I started in photography about five years ago with an aging Nikon D3100. I used it mostly to document my university drone team: competitions, manufacturing, the whole process. It was not always about aesthetic beauty. It was about preserving what had happened.

That is where the art actually lies. A photograph, done well, is not a recording of light rays. It is an anchor for memory. When you look at it again, it should evoke something, the way good art does.

The first dilemma any photographer faces is how far to edit. You adjust colours, contrast, shadows. You modify reality. The question that follows is whether that is justified.

I think it often is. Memory is not photographic. We remember a sunset as darker or more orange depending on how we felt that day. The raw capture misses that entirely. Adjusting an image to convey what a moment actually felt like may be more faithful to the experience than leaving it untouched.

Removing elements is more delicate. If I delete a passerby who wandered into the frame, the viewer never knows, and I have captured exactly what I intended. The brain does something similar: we live through situations and simply do not retain what did not matter.

But some elements are precisely what give an image its meaning. Remove the well-dressed reporter from the background of a disaster photograph and you have changed the story. You are no longer transmitting reality; you are broadcasting a version of it filtered through what you wanted the viewer to feel.

Adding new elements is where the dilemma sharpens. I would love to photograph a plane crossing paths with a bird in the same focal plane. Capturing that requires patience, timing, and a degree of luck that makes the achievement real. The easy path is to add the bird with generative AI and produce something indistinguishable from the genuine shot.

Consider what that would mean. If athletes decided to use cars instead of running, Formula 1 would be the only sport. The effort is not incidental to athletics; it is the point. Photography is no different.

The real question

Artificial intelligence is pushing this logic to its limit. If I can generate an image, why bother taking it? If I can invent a more compelling story, why document what actually happened?

But I do not take photographs for the sake of taking photographs. I take them to immortalise moments. And to immortalise a moment, you have to have lived it.

That will sometimes mean editing, removing noise, even adding something you could not capture in the moment. None of that is what concerns me. What concerns me is the substitution of experience itself: constructing a reality you never inhabited and presenting it as memory.

The question is never whether it is acceptable to edit an image. The question is whether what you are doing still serves what you are actually trying to do.

"Photography is the story I fail to put into words."
Destin Sparks