How AI raises new as well as age-old questions about 'documentary' photography

The idea that AI could do what pointing a camera lens at a subject and taking a photograph could achieve challenges some of the most deeply held and fundamental understandings about what documentary photography is. But in forcing conversations about the status of AI-generated so-called ‘documentary’ photography, it also raises age-old questions about truth and photojournalism. And in the context of an awards like D&AD, what kind of a precedent would awarding such work set? Laura Havlin, D&AD’s Head of Content and former Senior Editor at Magnum Photos, speaks to experts in the photography and advocacy space to wade through the questions raised by AI generated images of migrants.

‘Exhibit A-i: The Refugee Account’, a photography project and resultant photobook by Australian advertising agency Howatson+Company for social justice law firm Maurice Blackburn, seeks to visualise the conditions for refugees detained by the Australian government in offshore detention centres, where cameras and journalists are not permitted. Based on the belief that “only by making injustice visible can we provoke change”, the firm conducted 300 hours of interviews with refugees, recording the dire conditions in offshore detention. With AI technicians and photojournalists, survivors collaborated on creating what the agency describes as the first visual evidence of the detainees’ experiences. These images, they explain, were then to be integrated into stock libraries alongside real photojournalism.

Having initially been entered into the Documentary Photography category, it was moved, after much discussion by judges. “We spent a lot of time debating it,” says jury president Jane Stockdale, explaining that the judges decided that there was “no way we would award this as documentary photography, because it’s not documentary photography, and undermines the work of documentary photographers.” So, they put it into the Conceptual Photography category, where it landed on the shortlist.

“We thought it was a great way to make people aware of what's going on in the offshore detention sites, when journalists and cameras are banned, because it’s difficult to attract public attention to something unseen,” says Stockdale, going on to emphasise how important the context around the visuals is. “It was just so well done,” she says. “The human rights law firm conducted 300 hours of interviews and the images were created based on these testimonies. The book created was beautifully designed in the style of a legal document – backed up with these images, which were also exhibited outside Parliament House and created a lot of media attention. We awarded this a shortlist position based on the big picture context of the interviews, the book, the exhibition and social awareness campaign.”

The importance of execution is also key for Sophie Wright, Executive Director at Fotografiska, New York, who commented on the work for this piece: “The subject matter is very political and distressing so it really needs to be very well landed within thoughtful text and context.” And while the book offers that context, the other proposed use for the images – integrating them into stock libraries alongside real photojournalism – flags up one of the key areas of contention for the experts who contributed to this article. “That's slightly more problematic,” says Jess Crombie, humanitarian sector consultant and Senior Lecturer in ethics and communications at London College of Communication. “It'll get a bit murky at that point,” she says, wondering which photo archives would accept them and how they’d be signposted.

For Crombie, however, the process of the image-making itself “is more important than what comes out the other end.” Much of the debate around truth and authenticity is based on how we as an audience respond to those images, but “the focus is actually on what process is happening, and who is getting to make editorial decisions,” explains Crombie.

By basing the images on testimony conducted by human rights lawyers, working collaboratively with the subjects, “you actually have a bunch of people with lived experience who are making editorial decisions,” as opposed to far-removed commissioning photo editors, or photojournalists from a totally different experience helicoptering in and out for the shoot, says Crombie. “You could argue that you actually have something more authentic with this, rather than with an outsider going in and just taking a bunch of photos over a couple of days.” The key to establishing just how much more authenticity this method brings to the process of capturing their stories is the measure of the involvement of the photograph’s subjects. As the title of the work suggests, this should be the refugee's account.

“That's the contemporary piece really,” says Wright. “If they've got the subjects to tell their own stories with the technology.” It fills in a gap that subjects of photos often feel, that isn’t how they perceive themselves, or the situation. That the image doesn’t depict their understanding of how things were. “I’m interested in this idea of what happens when you get subjects to create their own pictures.”

“I was thinking about things like The London Illustrated News,” says Wright. “What did you do before photography? You drew a picture, and in a way, that's sort of what this is. It's kind of providing the content for you to empathise with the story in a way that you perhaps wouldn't if it was just text, but it’s an illustration – in a way. But more than that, it’s not just an illustrator creating the work, it's actually the victims of the situation that are involved.”

In a sense, the AI-generated images behave like a diagram representing the qualitative data of the interviews; the quality and accuracy of the diagram depends on the quality of that input data (which is purportedly strong, done to legal standards), and the extent to which the detainees were able to collaborate on the final image – to ensure it was a true representation of their experiences. Though it might not be ‘documentary photography’, the images are a document of sorts.

Genuine documentary photographers are starting to experiment in this space too. One being renowned American photographer Michael Christopher Brown, known for his documentary of the 2011 Libyan civil war, and who has photographed in the likes of Cuba and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He describes his recent explorations into AI with project ‘90 Miles’ as “a post-photography AI reporting illustration experiment exploring historical events and realities of Cuban life that have motivated Cubans to cross the 90 miles of ocean separating Havana from Florida.”

He explains it as a way of documenting subjects he would like to document but hasn’t been able to due to issues of access. “90 Miles may reflect a novel way to translate narratives into useful imagery connecting people with important stories of our time,” he writes on his website, but acknowledges, “we must maintain the integrity of the photograph and create barriers around certain AI outputs. But we must also use it to our advantage.”

“It's just a completely different thing that's been created,” says Wright. “It looks like a photograph, but it's not. It dredges up new conversations around AI technology and how accurate that is, and whether that should be considered documentary or not, but it also dredges up a load of historical stuff. Photography's never been always the truth, it's as much about the gaze as it’s about the content, how things are framed and the story that the photographer wants to tell.”

Wright is referring to the inherent biases in traditional documentary photography: from the choice of a photo editor to commission one story angle over another, to the photographer’s decision about where to point their lens (and what to turn it away from); as well as the documented cases of alleged staging or doctoring of images, calling into question the validity of a photograph as a document.

Robert Capa’s 1936 photograph The Falling Soldier, depicting the death of a Republican Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth soldier in the Spanish civil war, has been pored over for years, with commenters hotly contesting whether it was a staged fall. And in 2016, American travel photographer Steve McCurry, best known for his famous photo Afghan Girl, was alleged to have moved objects in some of his photographs.

AI would make extensive intervention the rule and not the deviation. “The fear is that the art of photography, from the historic perspective, may be eroded because people don't trust the images they're looking at,” says Wright. Trustworthiness is particularly vital in advocacy content because of the role the images play in raising awareness of issues, fundraising for organisations, or affecting material change.

“Photographic journalism, because of the tremendous audience reached by publications using it, has more influence on public thinking and opinion than any other branch of photography. For these reasons, it is important that the photographer-journalist have (beside the essential mastery of his tools) a strong sense of integrity and the intelligence to understand and present his subject matter accordingly,” wrote American mid-century photographer W. Eugene Smith in a June 1958 piece he penned for Photo Notes.

As a document, the book Exhibit A-i: – The Refugee Account is a searing indictment of the conditions the refugees face. It was presented to Australia’s Minister for Immigration, who is reportedly using the evidence in key meetings. This follows a long history of real documentary photography effecting change, such as Magnum photographer Ian Berry’s photographs of the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 apartheid South Africa, which were used to support his testimony that police had shot people in their backs as they ran away. When Philip Jones Griffiths’ seminal 1971 book Vietnam Inc. was reissued in 2001, American writer Noam Chomsky wrote: “If anybody in Washington had read that book, we wouldn’t have had these wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.”

In 2015, shocking images of the drowned body of two-year-old Syrian boy Alan Kurdi, washed up on a Turkish beach, showed the tragic plight of refugees and prompted public outcry. And though conditions for migrants and refugees might have changed very little, with these kinds of images, argues Wright, “If just a few people are impacted by pictures that can cause change, I think it can cause individuals to change course… I don't completely believe images can change general public opinion, but individuals can be impacted in a positive way or a negative way, by pictures for sure.”

But there are some potentially appealing uses for AI ‘documentary’ photography by NGOs, beyond making images of what is impossible to photograph for legal and logistical reasons. There is much ethical debate about using the real images of real people who are victims. In a recent interview with Bond, the UK network for organisations working in international development, Hamish Crooks, Chair of the Association of Photographers, shared his perspective on the future of photography with Rachel Erskine, co-chair of Bond’s People in the Pictures working group: “In the past, I saw NGO campaigns, such as one produced by Shelter in the 1990s, using real stories accompanied by footage posed by models as it would have been unethical to show real people in those situations,” he says. “Will the NGO sector use AI in a similar way? I guess that depends on how successful those campaigns are.”

He also offers a warning for those considering using AI images for advocacy content: “We must remember that although these images aren’t real, they are based on real images. As a result, the end product will carry the same biases as the datasets that have been used to create it. If the AI is scraping poverty porn, then the result will be poverty porn, so it doesn’t solve the problem. The number one rule in photography still applies here: you only read a picture through your cultural leanings.”

As for the existential question many in creative industries are asking themselves around how AI might push them out of a job, the commenters in this article all believe that there will continue to be an important role for photography: Crooks points out that news photography has to be real “and there are very strict rules around that”, and Wright, looking back over the many changes the industry has already weathered over the past century, says, “It's going to be another part of the photography story, but it's not going to be the death of photography.”

While the consensus is that AI will certainly impact stock and ecommerce photography, and affect commercial retouching businesses, with other forms of photography the future is more mixed, predicts Wright: “I think it’s important to note that creatively, some photographers are embracing AI to rethink their artistic practice in completely new ways. For those operating in the documentary arena, it will be a challenge. However, just like other forms of digital innovation it won't replace but run alongside strongly authored content – it will likely mean fewer professional photographers – but excellence will still win out.”