Generative AI has had a massive impact on photography in the last couple of years. The moment Midjourney could conjure a flawless sunset over the Maldives without anyone leaving their bedroom, the game changed irrevocably. Why trudge through tourist hordes at Santorini when an algorithm can deliver that golden hour shot with perfect composition, no cruise ships cluttering the frame, and lighting that would make Ansel Adams weep? AI doesn’t deal with weather delays, equipment failures, or that inevitable moment when someone’s selfie stick ruins your carefully planned shot.
This isn’t a tragedy. It’s evolution.
For years, photography has been drowning in its own superficial pursuit of the aesthetically pleasing. Instagram in particular turned every photographer into a content factory, churning out variations of the same coastal sunrise, the same moody forest path, the same neon-soaked urban night. We convinced ourselves these images mattered because they accumulated likes, but they were already meaningless before AI arrived. They were stock photography masquerading as art.
Now that machines can generate infinite variations of “pretty,” the real work begins. And it will shift from pretty to documentary (to be clear, I consider photojournalism a specialisation of documentary).
Documentary photography survives because it possesses something AI fundamentally cannot: intent born from witness. An algorithm might generate a convincing image of displacement, poverty, or political unrest, but it cannot decide these stories need telling. It cannot recognise the moment when power reveals itself, when injustice crystallises into a single frame, when humanity’s contradictions become visible.
AI could generate a thousand images of urban decay or rural neglect, each technically superior to anything any human has captured. But it couldn’t tell which stories matter, which moments demand preservation, which truths need dragging into the light. It cannot feel the weight of responsibility that comes with pointing a camera at someone else’s life.
The photojournalist who risks everything to document conflict zones brings back more than images. They bring context, relationships, the accumulated understanding that comes from being present when history unfolds. An AI can simulate the visual aftermath of conflict, but it cannot simulate the decision to bear witness.
Even personal work gains new significance in this context. Those photographs you took wandering through abandoned industrial sites last winter are no longer just images. They’re proof of experience, documentation of time spent, evidence of curiosity acted upon. AI could generate better versions of every single frame, but it couldn’t generate the story of why you were there, what you discovered about the place and yourself, what connections emerged between past and present.
This shift transforms even the most casual photography. That sunrise you photographed from your hotel balcony in Barcelona becomes documentary evidence of a moment you chose to inhabit fully rather than sleep through. The difference between generating that image and capturing it is the difference between fantasy and memory, between simulation and lived experience.
Suddenly, that photography road trip you were planning to take isn’t just a road trip. It’s a documentary about your life. It’s a story of your story, a witness of the fact that you were there and you saw the things you saw. It’s no longer important that the photos are not technically perfect. They gain significance in losing prettiness.
Photography doesn’t have to be world-changing. We’re not all extraordinary photojournalists who risk their lives to witness the worst of humanity. AI can’t know what your daily life looks like. Document it. AI can’t know that your local fisherman village is dying. Document it. AI can’t know that your neighbouring housing estate is going to be torn down. Document it a la Atget.
Social media photography, meanwhile, deserves its AI-induced death. The endless cycle of performative image-sharing was always hollow. If generating perfect content becomes effortless, perhaps we’ll finally abandon the pretense that curated feeds represent authentic life. The platforms built on artificial scarcity of beautiful images will collapse under artificial abundance.
What emerges will be more honest: photography as investigation, as preservation, as witness, as documentation. The camera becomes a tool for engaging with reality rather than escaping it. We stop asking whether our images are pretty enough and start asking whether they’re true enough, whether they reveal something worth knowing.
In a way AI gave us a gift: in 20 years’ time, your most beautiful photos won’t mean anything to you. Yes, they’ll still be nice, but you won’t care about them. What you’ll care about is the documentation of your life, reminders of people you lost touch with, of places you’ve been but forgot.
One of the things I regret is not to have taken on photography earlier. I have a 15 years gap in my life that I can’t account for in images: when I wa s kid, my parents would take photos once in a while, so I have a few photos of my childhood (though not many); then I have photos from my 30s; but nothing in-between. My 20s is when I did the most important things in my life (moving to a new country, doing a PhD, getting an industry job) and when I met the most influential people in my life. But I can’t show it. I have no trace of it because I didn’t document it.
The future belongs to photographers who understand that their real job was never making beautiful pictures. It was paying attention, being present, recognising significance when it appears. AI can simulate vision, but it cannot simulate consciousness choosing where to look. By pushing us away from pretty pictures, AI makes us concentrate on what we’ll care about in the future and that’s a Good thing.
The pretty picture industrial complex is finished. The real work is just beginning.
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