Every Picture

“Close your eyes, and only thirty per cent remains” – in other words, unless you were born blind, you take in seventy per cent of the world around you through your eyes. The slogan of this old advertisement underlines how important the eye, sight and visual perception are in the way we sense the world around us.

The technology of the 21st century copies this important sense of ours, serves it, and, when needed, replaces it.

At today’s level of science and culture, the primary carrier and medium of information – visible to the human eye and also digitally processable – is the PICTURE.

Be it a freehand copy of a cave painting, a book page, a sheet of music, a photograph, a film frame, a 3D laser survey, a set of design drawings, a child’s drawing, a photogram of the trace of a particle collision in the hadron collider, a painting, and so on – EVERYTHING.

What is more, today nearly everyone takes pictures. Devices capable of still images, moving images, even 3D imaging are in the hands of the masses. Today we can even generate images from a text prompt. Wonderful things are born this way.

For most of humanity, it is an everyday joy to make pictures or short films that depict something they have a connection to, something they can look at again at any time. This awareness, this possibility, matters even if they never look at it again.

When these pictures are made, creative intent is present, and so is the wish to formulate a message that others – the viewers – can understand too. They are works, even if they can often be criticised from a technical, aesthetic or ethical point of view.

This multi-billion “snapshot-taking mass”, as the anointed, trained image-makers call them, is invaluably important. On the one hand, because they document the world around them more precisely and in greater detail than any previous era in history. On the other hand, because with their tools they set off – or extinguish – social changes on a global scale.

In my view, the most significant social effect beyond this is that making, shaping and sharing pictures, and reaping the effect of that sharing, has become one of the most important sources of joy in these times.

I will not go into surveillance cameras here, or into the countless image-making devices and systems used in automation.

I regard this explosive growth in the use of the digital image as the next great step in the development of humanity, a GUTENBERG moment. Perhaps the most important technical achievement, the greatest change, is visuality that is digitally captured, held in the hand, processed, analysed and synthesised. Since the end of the 20th century, development in this field has been accelerating exponentially, and this acceleration runs through the development of the whole global world.

So far we have only spoken of pictures made by living people, but now we also have AI, which pours pictures onto us like a tsunami.

The comprehensive system of digital information processing, analysis and generation that we call AI can only process content that did not come into being digitally once it has been digitised – once a picture has been made of it – and only then can it build that content in among the billions of pages it has already processed. In this way it comes ever closer to completeness. A consequence worth thinking through is what happens when the texts it generates are processed again and again: does the essence degrade or improve?

The same problem arises when we look at AI’s astonishing and rapidly developing abilities with images.

I sense a tendency that – I can find no other word for it – tabloidises the visual result.

If they – if we – do not find the antidote to this, the exponentially growing mass of images will fill the space like expanding foam, filling every crack of the possible uses of pictures.

Until very recently, to make a good picture, the creator had to know how to capture the feelings welling up inside with some kind of tool, and to create a physical or digital depiction.

Today the word is taking the place of the brush; imagination meets no obstacles of craft, and image-making can pour out with no dams at all.

Whatever the result, it is immediately built into the knowledge of AI. Who? What? is able to keep this within its banks?

The process of growth is currently running in the exponential range; it is uncontrollable, and its consequences are unpredictable.

Will AI not influence visual culture more than anyone could foresee?

One of the very aims of the present idea, whose introduction I am – we are – struggling with, is to create a way to identify and certify that a given, physically existing piece of a work “is of human origin”. Without excluding physically executed works made with the use of AI.

Moreover, today’s image-making devices can sense pictorial information well below and beyond the visible range. They make visible what is invisible to the human eye. They can even look back in time towards the moment the universe was born – the James Webb Space Telescope, for example.

In this ocean of pictures, this galaxy of pictures, an outstanding role falls to photographers: to the professionals who master, apply and develop the technology of pictures made with photographic tools.

At the same time, it is also their responsibility that the “quality” of pictures serves progress – technically, aesthetically (which for me means keeping the viewer in mind) and ethically.

There can be no doubt that every person or business that invests in image-making and image-processing tools and technologies, and owns the picture, is investing in the most important technology of the 21st century – in its system for carrying value and sharing information.

Let’s save the world: let’s collect pictures. Important, good, beautiful, true pictures.

True, the world around us also has taste, smell, touch and sound. I am not a brain scientist, but these experiences immediately take the shape of pictures in me – and I suppose I am not special in this either.

COLLECT PICTURES!