Impact
There is something mesmerising about capturing reflected light through a pinhole. The process of fixing that image is now something I’m thinking about more and more as I work in the darkroom.
There are choices to be made and I am hoping over the coming months that those choices will widen out into more sustainable practices as I look at the impact of my photography.
Coming from a digital photography background, the natural resources required to make a digital file tend to be unseen. In my experience, that can create a disconnect. I am not seeing the impact of my choices when I sit at my computer as clearly as when I’m reading labels in the darkroom.
Currently, Ai produces approximately 20g of carbon when generating an image according to a recent study. It also requires other resources like water to cool those servers. I’ve never used Ai to generate images in my work, but a lot of software now features the ‘power of Ai’ to automatically select areas of an image or manipulate pixels to sharpen or de-noise. It is quickly becoming the standard for even basic tasks.
Separation ©Julie Corcoran 2020
I always preferred capturing my digital work in-camera. Separation which features three women dressed in red inside three boxes, was a photograph of my daughter in an actual large box. My props are either secondhand or reimagined items from around my home, even the dresses come from charity shops. Anyone who has heard my talk will know I explain all my work like that, planning the image, capturing as much in camera as possible, spending as little time as possible in front of a screen.
I know when I copy and paste this text into my blog, my website provider will offer to polish it up using Ai. Three pulsating bubbles in the top left corner gently trying to coax my attention. The question is, did I click?