What is "photography"

In DPR, this sort of post would immediately get locked or deleted and you might have got sin-binned because it was guaranteed to create a massive flame war.

But this is not DPR, so let's see 😉

Well, for about 200 years photography was basically an entirely (photo-)chemical process, optionally helped by lenses.

Digital CCD and CMOS sensors changed that drastically, so I'd say today's "digital photography" is really something else than what we now call "analog photography", just the end products may turn out similar.

Even advanced techniques like multiple exposures, focus stacking, HDR, etc. were used back then with film. What once required significant skill and effort is now made much easier, thanks to computational photography and digital post processing.

Currently AI helps us to get to the next major increment in the evolution of photography. I perceive generative AI tools like Copilot and Midjourney as the culmination of collage techniques in photography.

In the most basic form, I point a camera at a subject and the camera takes a photograph. Fox Talbot called it the "Pencil of Nature". I guess he ment drawing with light, which is a pretty good definition.

At this point I have a latent image that needs processing in or out of camera. The camera can be a cell phone, right up to a huge space telescope. The next step is the photograph where it is processed to become a print and the question becomes, what is a photograph?

Text generated AI images are illustration, not photography, as the were not generated by a sensitive surface recording an image projected by a lens.

Photographic images can completely be made without any camera and without any lens, e.g. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photogram

Generative AI is trained from actual photos, zillions of them, and keeps their essence by transforming it into lots of parameters for the neural nets these tools are based on.
Although their user interface may be entirely text based, what you get as an end result is the regurgitated essence of the photos they've been trained with, rearranged at pixel level in most intricate collage patterns.

For me, a photograph is an image taken with a camera. And after a certain level of manipulation, a photograph becomes a digital image. I'm not very clear about what the limit is and, honestly, it's not something that worries me much either...

Maybe it helps to look at the genesis of the work "photography." It means "drawing with light." Since the first daguerreotype where light was captures by a chemical reaction of an emulsion smeared on a glass plate - it was the capture capturing of photons that interacted with the silver halides in the emulsion.

It doesn't matter if the photons are being counted by silver halide crystals or being counted by photodetectors on a digital sensor - photography is "drawing with light." Merging of captures of the same scene in a short period of time, a.k.a. exposure bracketing is a photograph since it is processing the counting of photons from three different exposure settings.

However, a computer generated image from some AI model - no photons are counted. There is no drawing by light. While interesting images might be produced - it is NOT photography. Photography is an active process of "drawing with light."

That's my story and I'm sticking to it. 😉

The original daguerrotypes use sheets of silver-plated copper. No emulsion, No glass plate.

The collodion process was invented many years later.

And look at an X-ray photo - no light was involved in taking it, so no photography?

What about electron microscopes, magnetic resonance imaging, etc?

Well, X-rays are just part of the electromagnetic spectrum with a shorter wavelength than (visible to us) light - so it's still "light"

According to quantum theory, electrons can behave like waves - just as light can behave like particles (photons). It's a bit more tenuous, but does show the term "light" in the phrase "drawing with light" does not have to be simply the light we can see with our eyes

You've got me there! I don't really know how it works - something to look up when I've got some more time

Tim

Ummm, the act of taking / making a photograph? Sorry, couldn't resist

sounds right to me as well. photography clubs all over the world are still debating whether composite images is photography. panos, stacks. hdr are all regarded as photographic techniques. composite images are not but graphic art. our club of 20 years has had a massive division over this subject, the photographic society was brought into the discussion to mediate the topic. composites are a sub group subject was the conclusion. so half the members left the club 😆 because they couldnt take a decent image to save there life.

Funny thing: my computers just won't work without electrons!
Electrons can behave like waves, just like photons and light?
Eh, proof that AI tools are part of photography: they use electrons to generate images, they can behave as waves and like photons they are a form of light, thus it must be photography!

Photography is not something restricted to humans,
monkeys have succesfully shown they can do it,
why would you assume AI can't?

Of course an X-ray is photography - the radiation is just not visible to the human eye until it is capture by the appropriate film or digital sensor. We also can't see in the UV or IR radiation bands, but some animals can. The images coming off a UV camera or IR camera are photographs. Given the wave/particle duality - there is little difference between counting photons and counting electrons. It was Sir John Frederick William Herschel that coined the term photography. Herschel was and mathematician, astronomer and chemist that did research in all the fields. He performed research on the photographic process and was the first to inventing the cyanotype process, a.k.a., blueprints. He discovered the platinum process later refined by William Willis. Herschel studied the reactivity of certain chemical substances to UV radiation and it is the interaction between radiation (at the photon level) and matter that is the basis of "photography." Today that interaction is based on photon interaction with photosensitive material in photodetectors converting incident photons into electrons (also the basis of solar cells). Photography is made possible because of the photoelectric effect.

On the Daguerreotype - silver was being used to record incident photons through a physical reaction between the photons and silver halide electrons on the surface. The emulsions that came along later were much easier to work with. On the other hand the Daguerreotype was the first form of "emulsion" as the treating of the polished silver with halide fumes (Iodine or Bromine ) produced a thin layer of the silver halide which is the active ingredient in an emulsion. So the physics and chemistry of the Daguerrotype is basically equivalent to that of film.

"Emulsion"? Without any liquid in it?
I'd say it's more of a type of coating, not unlike what we still use today e.g. as optical coating for lenses (anti-glare etc.).

Okay. Then i will settle for generative AI being a budding form of "photography" as well. 😎

Nope. Light is 380 to 780nm. Anything else is not light.

In this forum, I think that we should follow the teachings of the CIE with reference to "light", rather than introducing obfuscation by X-rays, electron microscopes, FLIR, na-ni-na.

Therefore, any image produced by radiation outside of 380-780 nm is not produced by photography; it is merely an image.

I disagree.

Any form of AI generated images or parts of images is not photography. AI generates images or parts of images, not photographs or parts of photographs.

If AI generated images is photography then anyone or any thing combining and manipulating any of your or anyone else's images into an image would be creating a photograph. That’s ludicrous imo.

I see a photograph as being the image created from the captured light during a shutter actuation in a camera.

Photography is basically the making of a photograph as defined above.

Multiple photographs can then be combined and manipulated into a single image, not a photograph.

All photographs are images but not all images are photographs.

xpatUSA,

What does „CIE“ stand for, please?

David

Just down my street! 😂

David

I hadn't looked at this thread until a moment ago.
Photographs don't require cameras. In Melbourne some years ago there was (eventually) agreement that a major competition won with images created when models lay on large sheets of photo paper, in the dark, and then an image was made by turning on light, were technically photographs, Similar conclusions were reached around the Man Ray period.
Images have been able to be made in darkened rooms using pinholes, for many hundreds of years. They are not considered to be "photos." Any attempt to define "photography" therefore has to include some reference to how the image was formed and to the "fixing" involved that stores the image. After that, good luck. The speed of change in the technologies available keeps shifting the ground. Apple has had a go at it and I think it is close. "Something that really, actually happened." We might have to add a bit such as "Where the event was recorded in an image formed by light and the image was then stored by a fixing technology."
After that we go down the slipperiest of never ending slides when we try to define at what point altering the stored image is no longer a photograph. I don't think this point will ever be defined beyond argument.
But I do think the resurgence in film cameras is very much a response to digital manipulation and now many people becoming more appreciative of traditional camera skills.