I feel like in times of these kind of seismic shifts, we tend to over-estimate the future and romanticize the past. 

I never thought so much of this “bearing witness “-stuff: war and conflict-photography has been fucked up  for quite a while now, the systems of control are pretty much everywhere in place and we did not need AI to do that, thank you very much:  proof for the weapons of mass destruction were doctored and the actual truthy pictures of Abu Ghraib did not cause much of a ripple in the miltary-industrial complex, except for Lynndie England… war will still be beautiful, as David Shields pointed out, https://www.davidshields.com/books/war-is-beautiful

 and that a non-white Napalm girl could have moved the heart of America enough to end a war is an ongoing myth we tell ourselves in order not to lose faith in our cameras: 

https://theconversation.com/50-years-after-napalm-girl-myths-distort-the-reality-behind-a-horrific-photo-of-the-vietnam-war-and-exaggerate-its-impact-183291

And has the heart of photography not been hollow for a long time before the advent of AI?! Does it really make such a big difference when the third hand of a model on a magazine is an actual  woman’s hand  photoshopped  in or if this model does not even exist in the first place? What’s staring at me  from the newsstand never  felt real: the commodity is an imaginary thing and the photo is only a complicit part in its construction. If a photo in a catalog is from an actual sneaker or just a stitched together Frankenstein-shoe does not rob me of my sleep. Like with all kinds of automations: this was mindless, boring, repetitive work for a soulless landlord\corporation- yes, it brought food on the table but it never exactly was the kind of work that advances mankind- it only sells more shoes.

We derive our self esteem as photographers from the two percent images worth looking at and often tend to forget that the other 98% are used for manufacturing consent and selling stuff. I can’t find tears in me if AI is rampaging through these 98%…

Three-legged Dog, Bagan/Burma, December 2015

This is the illusion: That we’re living a mediocre life. Our day-to-day lives is extreme in almost every aspect. The killing industry that we built up to feed us daily meat for fun. We’re no longer killing out of necessity but for fun and profit. An industry that constantly engages us in some scheming that usually ends up in a never-ending string of wars. Countries that we topple or don’t save, breed unrest and confusion and endless suffering. The poor die because we somehow don’t have the nerve to kill the rich. And we look at screens all the time in order not to deal with ourselves. We are never where we belong, it is always better where the ads promise: The next film is better than the one you are watching, this music is not as good as the one that comes out next month, watch TV to be promised better entertainment in the following week.

It is ridiculous to say, that this is a mediocre life.

You are all indicted; stand up! Stand up as you would for the Marseillaise or God Save the King….
Dada alone does not smell: it is nothing, nothing, nothing.
It is like your hopes: nothing.
like your paradise: nothing.
like your idols: nothing.
like your politicians: nothing.
like your heroes: nothing.
like your artists: nothing.
like your religions: nothing.
Hiss, shout, kick my teeth in, so what? I shall still tell you that you are half-wits. In three months my friends and I will be selling you our pictures for a few francs.

— Manifeste cannibale dada by Francis Picabia, read at the Dada soirée at the Théâtre de la Maison de l’Oeuvre, Paris, 27 March 1920

Smoke, Frankfurt, August 2017

Ta voix, tes yeux, tes mains, tes lèvres.
Nos silences, nos paroles.
La lumière qui s’en va
La lumière qui revient.

— Paul Eluard

Moustache Bed; Athens, May 2016

A patina of nostalgia and Parisian romanticism now covers Eugene Atget’s images of early 20th-century Paris: We tend to forget how much Paris was in turmoil at the time. Haussmann had just demolished the medieval quarters that formed the fabric of Hugo’s novel with Notre Dame at its center – with its wide avenues and covered arcades, he had essentially turned Paris into the blueprint for today’s shopping malls. The first mass-produced goods began to appear in the shop windows, and the slow displacement of crafts and manual labor that had begun with the rise of the electrically-powered loom had begun to accelerate.

And while his pictures of the first auto repair shops now evoke a sense of nostalgia in us, his feelings must have been those of astonishment and horror at the disappearance of the world he once knew. In the last years of his life, he retreated to the parks of Saint Cloud: Gone were the signs of modernity, gone were the zombie-like mannequins that populated his shop windows. All that was left were quiet lakes, a statue in the mist, an abandoned bench.

In 2016, Greece was still ailing from wave after wave of austerity that had rolled over the country to whip it into what was deemed fiscal responsibility. On the cusp of a massive sell-off of public property into the hands of looming investors, public spending fell, labor income disappeared, unemployment rose and eventually shops were closing down. With a shock doctrine previously reserved for Central American countries, Greece had become the first neoliberal laboratory on European soil.

None of this was visible in the images I brought back from a short trip to Athens in 2016. Although the despair was palpable as you walked the streets, life went on: The markets were bustling, there were some small shops in the center still open for tourists, and of course, the Acropolis still towered over the city: We’ve seen worse, we’re still here. The ruins of abandoned houses, the closed-down shops took on a general meaning of the “cycle of life”: The “creative destruction” of economic forces turned out to make “good pictures”. By ‘picturesque’ we mean the concealment of social and economic realities under a vague acceptance of the transience of human life.

Eventually, Atget’s pictures were claimed by the Surrealists: And so began the petrifaction of his first experience of a rapidly changing Paris.