Photography by Barrie MacJannette LRPS
My background is in engineering and being a designer I've always had an interest in art in all its forms, especially visual art and music.
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Photography became a major interest back in the 1970s and in those early days I would wander around my home town taking shots of the streets and people and whatever else caught my eye. I set up a darkroom and spent many a happy hour making monochrome prints, with which I never seemed to be completely happy.
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The advent of digital photography changed everything, very quickly surpassing film in quality and allowing greater freedom in trying different approaches. I became interested in creative manipulation, using Photoshop, combining images to create what is generally referred to as magic realism. Naturally this upset the purists, who told me in no uncertain terms that it wasn't photography. So I responded by asking them what in photography actually depicts true reality.
Now, the question of "what is real" in imagery has been greatly widened with the advent of AI. There is fear that all imagery will become suspected of being "fake". It's not a new problem, in fact since the dawn of photography images have been falsified, often for artistic reasons, such as substituting a more interesting sky into a landscape. More sinister uses of photo manipulation include falsifying evidence for political or criminal reasons. Such challenges are not new, and will need to be addressed. But the creative spark that directs AI will, I believe always be human. No-one truly knows what entirely constitutes "intelligence", in all its forms. It is far wider than can be quantified.