This article makes clear that traditional notions of the camera break down when the machine is given “its own basic intelligence, agency, and access to information.” The labor divide between photographer and camera, human and machine becomes blurred and inconsistent. Examples such as GoogleClips and automatic image manipulation technologies suggests that taking photos or using a camera becomes a more scaffolded activity. It may seem that the increasing ‘agency’ of the camera results in a reduced sense of agency for the user of the camera — the machine is doing more, and the human is doing less — but is it also possible that the singular authorship associated with our notion of the camera is a myth? The agency of the operator — perhaps the individual who presses the button — might be more limited, but there are other people behind each camera — users, designers, engineers, scientists, business interests — who decide which realities are chosen and how they are captured and rendered. Any system of machine intelligence follows policies, and most of the times the policies are defined by human beings. Someone had to define what a “well-composed candid picture” means when designing GoogleClips. Portrait filters are based on transient standards of beauty.
Maybe, the labor model of the camera today should be one that recognizes the multiplicity of authorship involved in creating an image. Instead of emphasizing giving agency to an individual user of the camera, what would happen if we begin to emphasize a more transparent, and collaborative relationship between the multiple decision-makers behind the capture and creation of images?