I take pictures. And since you’re here on the website, you likely already know that; I doubt this statement can come as a surprise. What may surprise you, though, if you haven’t read the About Me section or if you haven’t looked carefully at the pictures, is that they are mostly analogue. And the process of taking analogue photography to post it online these days contains a very interesting twist – and not the one you are probably thinking about right now…
A long time ago, before the internet and before digital photography, we used to go out and about, take pictures, spend time in the darkroom to develop the negative and, sometimes, also to prepare the prints. Then we either hung them at home or, if one was lucky, in a gallery.
What happens now is more or less the following: first we go out in the world to capture light on negative, then we spend hours in the darkroom – this is the most real part of the photography. Then freaks like me digitalise the pictures. Later, we have to spend time acting as translators for a machine that cannot recognise or understand the pictures unless they are labelled with a proper ‘alt’ tag and displayed in a form that is actually crawlable for the indexing bots. Otherwise, the pictures won’t be easily searchable and Google will likely not show them to anyone. One could argue that the effect might be similar to not even developing the negative in the first place.
So nowadays, instead of just preparing the prints to show them to people, we also have to spend a lot of time convincing a set of algorithms that our work is very real and that our physical, tangible pictures actually exist in the online form in order for others to see them. And this process is – likely – going to be more and more time-consuming and complex, given that AI can generate stuff that is already OK-ish, so it’s easy to just flood a website with AI-generated content.
At the same time, Google wants to show more of the human work and less of the AI mass production so it adds more SEO requirements to distinguish between those. Which means that proving to a crawler bot that we are flesh and blood may require more and more work over time. It’s an interesting form of digital bureaucracy we all agree to in order to exist online.
Although the internet is designed to make things more available and to reach bigger audiences, when it comes to techniques like photography (analogue or not), we have actually added another complexity layer to the process of making one’s work public. One that also involves a middleman.
And isn’t it ironic that the very intermediary between two people – the person who takes the picture and the one who wants to view it – is the machine that requires a verbal translation of the images because it is fundamentally unable to “see”?