What is the role of a photographer when the camera takes its own photos? Christian Ervin, Design Director at Tellart, writes about the matter with a dusting of disempowerment in his piece The Camera, Transformed by Machine Learning. To him, examples of newfangled ai-powered cameras suggest “…a camera with a very different kind of relationship to its operator: a camera with its own basic intelligence, agency, and access to information.”
I would disagree with this characterization of a limp operator, which stems from how Ervin defines the act of photography. In discussing science fiction writer Bruce Sterling musings on futuristic computational photography, he describes photography’s “core action” as: “the selection of a specific vantage point at a specific moment in time.”
Instead, I would suggest the act of photography begins when one selects the camera. The operator selects and sets up a capture device based on how they want to see the world. How they want to understand reality. Indeed, they’ve decided to be an operator of a camera in the first place, to comprehend and remember the world through visual moments.
Then, the nature of the relationship between operator and “cameras with agency” can be boiled down to the size of the black box. How appraised is the operator of the inner workings of the camera? How intimate is the operator with the how that sensor understands the world, and how much knowledge do they have to alter it?
This gulf between operator and self aware sensors is not the chasm that it seems. Indeed, a camera has always been a black box to its casual users, the inner workings of light capture happening within obscured away. Similarly, I can’t be bothered to consider PNG/JPEG compression algorithms when using a smartphone camera. But conceptually, I understand the nature of capture that I should expect from a Polaroid Instant camera versus a digital smartphone camera. Similarly, in the case of Google Clips, I understand that an algorithm trained on well-composed images will capture similar kinds of images. Further, I still decide to photograph my world through that lens and place the camera in a location of my choosing; curatorial tasks of the photographer abound.