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.

film, Japan, street, Tokyo

photographing on the streets in Japan

April 11, 2024

Prior to going on the Basho and the Kumano Kodo pilgrim walks I decided to spend some time in the early morning walking the streets in Japan (initially the lively lanes in Shinjuku, Tokyo, then Morioka and Sendai) to make photographs. This was one way to cross the cultural barriers. A photographic layer of this photographic walking was using an old Leica M4 rangefinder and black and white film (Kodak Tmax 400) to supplement the much more versatile digital Sony A7R 111 camera. This connection to modernity’s technologically archaic past helped me to feel at “home” in the global mega city whilst avoiding being the free-floating, postmodern tourist.

I wanted to connect to, or link up with, the postwar Japanese black and white film street photography in the late twentieth century: — eg., Shōmei Tōmatsu, Daido Moriyama and Takuma Nakahira — with its candid, spontaneous sunappu images that was broadened by Ishiuchi Miyako and Takeda Hana, and continued with Yasuhisa Toyohara and Ohnishi Mitsugu in the 1980s. My images are a very marginal relationship to this tradition. The classic practitioners, such as Daido Moriyama, and Shōmei Tōmatsu lived in Shinjuku, viewed photography as a way of life, saw themselves either as vagabonds wandering the city streets aimlessly or as stray dogs hunting in the dark alleys of Shinjuku,and produced the short-lived left-wing magazine Provoke (1968–1969).

Though photography has a long historical connection to the city I was only a tourist staying in Shinjuku for 5 days aimlessly wandering amongst its maze of obscure lanes, bars and eating places.

abstraction, critical writing, large format

on abstraction

February 3, 2023

I want to pick up on an earlier post on photography and abstraction in relation to the practice of large format photography in order to begin to dig into what we mean by abstraction. There are multiple reasons for this. Firstly, the word abstract is vague, imprecise, and ambiguous, and secondly there has been little written about abstraction despite its centrality to the visual arts in the 20th century. Thirdly, there is even less written on abstraction in photography.

These reasons are underpinned by the habitual disdain for theoretical abstractions, which once informed empiricism, the philosophy with which the English-speaking world is most associated. This restricts abstraction to the mind wherein is identified as an abstract or general idea formed from sense data or sensory impressions of classes of objects or patterns in nature–ie, the general idea of rocks as opposed to these particular rocks. This post, then begins to explore what is conceptually meant by abstraction.

Abstraction in the visual arts in Australia is traditionally tied to both the modernist paintings in The Field Exhibition in the late 1960s, and to the modernist understanding of abstraction of Clement Greenberg’s conception of abstract visual art as the pinnacle of the medium of painting, due to it having succeeded (according to Greenberg) in stripping away other media. The art historical conception that is found in exhibition catalogues and art history books interprets abstraction as the absence of figuration or depiction of everyday objects. The consequence is that Patrick McCaughey, an Australian modernist follower of Greenberg, held that photographers should forget abstraction because it is not suited to the medium of photography. That was Greenberg’s position as well: the medium of photography in its essence was an art of documenting the world as opposed to documentary being a subdivision of photography.

If we are to explore abstraction in photography we need to step away from the habits and conventions of this modernist cultural frame in the sense of shifting our patterns of thought beyond familiar aesthetic norms so we can open up abstraction more broadly to new tendencies to stasis or change, eruptions and becomings. We need to look at abstraction conceptually, and not just in terms of what it has been as outlined in Lyle Rexer’s The Edge of Vision.

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.

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