black + white – Thought Factory

abstraction, AI, black + white, critical writing, digital image, water

seascapes and generative AI image making

May 21, 2024

It started when the Microsoft backed OpenAI went public in late 2022 with ChatGPT with its new technology of summarization. These new technologies, which process human generated information, are taking the form of being the newest, hottest thing with stock market speculation and investor stampede for AI startups. The hype cycle is in full swing, expectations are bubbling over into euphoria about the potential transformations. Silicon Valley’s motto is ‘move fast and break things’.

This Large Language Model (LLM) is a technology that makes it cheap and easy to summarize information. They generate general purpose text for chatbots, and perform language processing tasks such as classifying concepts, analysing data and translating text. Usable maps and summaries of big inchoate bodies of information can be incredibly helpful. So are the emerging transformations in human-machine interaction with respect to text, text to images and text to video. Apple, though, appears to have gone missing as it currently lacks a publicly available generative AI product.

AI-generated images are increasingly everywhere in contemporary visual culture with lots of whispers, positive vibes on the street and wild swings in the share prices of infrastructure and software vendors as investors attempt to read the tea leaves of the generative AI market. There is money in image-generating models. It’s akin to a gold rush.

If these cultural technologies are to have long term value, then they require reasonably high quality knowledge to keep on working. AI models are thus built on the backs of out-sourced human labor: people toiling away, providing mountains of training examples for AI systems that corporations can use to make billions of dollars. By themselves the AI do not provide a solution to the garbage-in, garbage-out problem, from the ever increasing disinformation, hallucination and fakery on the internet. So how do they get the right data with all this tainted data? How is that data protected in the applications built on top of the AI platforms? How will they address safeguards around facial recognition? Are safety culture and processes taking a backseat to shiny products?

The tectonic cultural plates are indeed shifting — eg., using Claude on the iPhone indicates that the modern chatbots allow users to now interact with computers through natural conversation–and the newly arrived flirtatious and coquettish GPT-40 that accepts visual, audio, and text input, and generate output in any of those modes from a user’s prompt or request. Creating images through innovative AI generators, such as OpenAI’s art generator DALL-E 3, or Midjourney and Stable Diffusion has become a new form of image production.

This is based on a text prompt that then turns it into a matching image — it assembles a new images from a database of already existing ones. So the dataset is just a big scrape of the Internet, and the current legal situation about intellectual property is incredibly murky, given that the AI companies are using copyrighted images to train their algorithms without asking for consent or offering compensation.

By the looks of it, AI generated images will have a big immediate impact on stock photography to the extent of replacing Shutterstock-type photography. Adobe is saying in relation to its Firefly AI generator to ‘skip the photoshoot‘, rather than enhancing the photoshoot. The political economy here is simple: Adobe gets the money as Firefly will be used to benefit their makers at the expense of others. At the moment I see the array of new generative “AI” tools to enable me to modify my photographic images as being offered solutions to problems in post-processing that I don’t have.

black + white, South Australia, trees, water

a post colonial photography?

May 28, 2023

I have recently been thinking about possible approaches to a postcolonial photography in the current geological era of the
Anthropocene. One approach I started to explore is the idea of a stained or dark pastoral.

Another possible approach is an eco-photography. The photo below is of a wetland in the Overland Corner Reserve that is adjacent to the River Murray in South Australia. The background to this approach is the environmental destruction carried out over generations by the settler colonists seeking to anglicize a country. Their view was that nature was an adversary to be subjugated and that this was a country to loot — a view that still around today with the multinational mining companies. Dried out wetlands are the scar of this landscape destruction:

This is another example from the same pre-Covid roadtrip. Another example is here.

On this roadtrip I was starting to look for and trace the overland route that had been used by the overlanders to bring stock to South Australia from Sydney in the early 1840s. I was starting to explore the Riverland region around Lake Bonney, connecting the route to known massacre sites. Then Covid happened and the momentum was lost.

Both of these photographic approaches are a critical perspective on the landscape tradition in Australia insofar as they start to trace and explore the negative consequences of colonial settlement on the country.

black + white, Encounter Studio, large format, people

Encounter Studio

November 9, 2022

We have a small space downstairs that’s a storeroom, even though I had thought that I could set it up as a studio space. In this space sits a Cambo studio stand, a 8×10 Sinar P monorail and two background poles that I’d purchased in the 1980s, a fridge for film and dog food, two filing cabinets and a camera trunk for a large format camera. But the photography has not happened, and the studio space has become a storeroom by default. Every time I go into the storeroom I become depressed looking at all that camera gear just sitting there waiting to be used. I keep asking myself: how can I use this setup.

The photography has not happened for several reasons. The studio space only has a small side window and so the exposures are more than 1-2 minutes during the summer months when the afternoon light comes into the room. It is is filtered through the bushes in the garden outside the window and when it is cloudy the exposures are around 4 minutes. During winter the studio is quite dark, and though I did consider some studio lights, I didn’t really want to go down that pathway, or spend money on that kind of equipment. Secondly, though I considered doing still life photography, and experimented a bit, I wasn’t all that interested in that photographic genre. So nothing happened.

Then I came across the above archival portrait of Suzanne that had been made in the large downstairs room with its big window just after we had moved from Adelaide to Encounter Bay on the Fleurieu Peninsula. I started thinking: well, why not portraits? Why not use the potential studio space to photograph our friends? I then remembered that I had initially rejected the studio portrait option as I’d thought that the 2 minute plus minimum exposures would be too long for people to pose.

Then I realised that long exposures incorporate time and the inevitable bodily movement of the sitter during that exposure is a representation of time. The tracing of movement through an extended exposure time is quite distinct from that produced by a series of instantaneous photographs. So why not turn what I’d initially thought to be as a negative into a positive?

black + white, large format, nature, trees

Feature: large format #4

July 18, 2022

This feature is part of an infrequent series of posts of images made with large format cameras. The previous post in the series was Feature #3 of a wetland in the Hindmarsh River in Victor Harbor.

I made the picture below with an 8×10 Cambo monorail in the early morning. It is of the wetlands of the River Murray near the Overland Corner Reserve in the Riverland region of South Australia. I was exploring the area around the Overland Corner tracing the overland route used by the drovers (ie., overlanders) to take stock from New South Wales to Adelaide between 1830 and the early 1840s. This route followed a much older Aboriginal pathway. At the time I was trying to gain a sense of the history of the River Murray in the Riverland region.

I camped overnight in the reserve close to the River Murray and made a number of pictures the following morning. The pictures were for a collaborative project on the River Murray that eventually fell through when the organizer and the lead artist just walked away from the project without saying anything.

There was no water in the wetlands even though the River Murray was just to the right of the picture. The ground was very dry and many of the trees in the “wetland” were dead. The wetlands along the river were dying from lack of water due to there being no flooding in recent years. So much water was being taken out by upstream irrigators that there was nothing left for environmental flows. The decade old Murray-Darling Plan to increase the environmental flows by 450 gigalitres has failed, but the irrigators have increased their allocations. Surprise, surprise.

black + white, critical writing, Melbourne, photography, topographics, urban

Interview: Stuart Murdoch

May 7, 2021

I have decided to do the odd interview with photographers whose work I find interesting and who are interested in engaging in a conversation about their work. ‘Interviews’ will only be an occasional feature of the Thoughtfactory blog. This, the first in the series, is with Stuart Murdoch.

Stuart is a Melbourne based photographer. He has adopted a topographic mode of working, continues to run a couple of photography blogs (one on photography and one on Sunshine); is a member of the Melbourne Photobook Collective; and an administrator of the Australian and New Zealand Topographics group on Flickr. He and I have occasionally collaborated around a rethinking documentary photography project.

Gary Sauer-Thompson (GS-T)

Thanks for offering to do the interview on your industrial Melbourne photos Stuart. The interview will be posted on the Thoughtfactory blog and it maybe cross posted to the blog of View Camera Australia. My observation of what is happening in photo-land is that most photographers in Australia traditionally talk about a particular print, or about their technique, or their equipment, despite, or in spite of, the art world being conceptually orientated since conceptual art in the 1960s. This traditional photo land approach strikes me as an unhelpful way to make sense of your industrial photos of Melbourne series, which has been ongoing for a decade or more. A more fruitful approach is to shift the emphasis to understanding your series of photos as a project.

Can you describe what this project is (ie., the idea behind the project), what you are trying to do with making this project and how has it evolved over time. If it has evolved over time, how has this changed the way you have have approached photographing industrial Melbourne. Can you describe what photographic and or literary or cultural influences have informed your photography, and how have these shaped the way that have understood both the project and they way you approached the photography.

Stuart Murdoch (SM) Thanks for the invitation Gary, and what a great set of questions to kick off with.

Initially I never set out to photograph the industrial in Melbourne. Like many students starting out I aspired to making work that was considered valuable and usually pictorially conservative subject matter. At University I discovered Robert Adams, and The New Topographic Exhibition in 1977 1. I never looked back and continue working in this way to this day. I have seen enough of each of the photographer’s work, leading up to and after the exhibition, to gain an understanding and appreciation of ideas being put forward by William Jenkins².

Stuart Murdoch, Port Melbourne, looking west, 1990

Robert Adams especially has for me been particularly inspiring. I have quite a few of his monographs and other books. His early essays, helped clarify in my own mind something I’d seen around me, since my early days of photography in the late 1980’s, but was unable to articulate, until, as he suggests in one of his essays, I found a map and compass and sent out to find my own way. Adams’ ideas about hope are central to how I approach my photography.

The idea that the urban was worthy of photographing was revelatory. But I wanted more than a dispassionate view that Jenkins espoused to frame the approach to the New Topographics. The question I asked myself was it; or is it ever, possible to photograph one’s own place with “dispassionate neutrality”? ³ I would argue that it is not. Though the New Topographic Photographers like Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz and Joe Deal, may have approached or attempted to approach their work from a neutral and distant style, my own work is more ardent.

This place — Melbourne — is my home.

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