{"id":7229,"date":"2026-05-02T08:47:45","date_gmt":"2026-05-02T06:47:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/?p=7229"},"modified":"2026-05-02T08:47:45","modified_gmt":"2026-05-02T06:47:45","slug":"the-book-that-started-as-a-newsletter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/2026\/05\/02\/the-book-that-started-as-a-newsletter\/","title":{"rendered":"The Book That Started as a Newsletter"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I recently reviewed my library of posts and it gave me an idea. What began here as a random series of posts about photography turned into something different as I went through them: an argument about the last two centuries of human record-keeping, about what it cost us to have a medium we trusted automatically, and about what the loss of that trust actually means.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The photo books I made<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

That argument is now a “book”: The Post-Evidence World: Photography Was Never Just a Witness<\/em>. I created my argument as a short book mostly for fun (with chapters, page setup, and everything). I didn’t even know at the start if I would finish it. But once I started I wanted to know how far it would go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the process of writing it, I realised I needed more than what I had already in my newsletter. The newsletter was exploratory, following an obsession without quite knowing where it was going. The book found a destination that I didn’t have in my head when I started the process. I came in thinking about photography. I came out thinking about something more important to us humans: the sequence of losses that preceded photography’s current crisis, and why photography being last on that list matters more than most accounts of the AI problem have recognised.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It also changed what I think about photographers, and about myself as one. The book’s subtitle is a provocation I mean seriously: photography was never just a witness<\/a>. The convenient fiction that the camera records and the photographer steps aside, pure evidence, the medium speaking for itself, was always exactly that. A fiction. The collapse of automatic photographic authority has not taken something real away from photographs. It has removed the cover story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The posts that fed into it are still here in the archive. Some of you will recognise the ideas in a different form. The book is a different thing from any of them: a proper argument built to earn its conclusion rather than gesture at it in a few paragraphs, written for readers who have never thought carefully about photography as much as for those who have thought about little else. The argument runs through journalism, law, the historical record, and the ordinary problem of knowing what happened in the world when the tools we built to answer that question have started producing the wrong answers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I may be wrong about some of it. I probably am, somewhere. But I am less wrong than I was when I started.<\/p>\n\n\n\n