Digital Photography After AI: Continuity and Rupture in the Age of Automated Images

How AI-generated images radically alter our interactions with photography as well as our understanding of it.

In recent years, artificial intelligence technologies have made it easy for anyone to produce images that look indistinguishable from photographs. How do these AI-generated images change our understanding of photography? Should we consider them photography at all? In Digital Photography After AI, Amanda Wasielewski explores these questions as well as the historical and theoretical concerns for the field of photography in light of the widespread use of AI tools.

The book connects AI-generated photographs to a longer history of photography, ranging from Henry Fox Talbot in the nineteenth century to Surrealism and the mid-twentieth-century media to recent trends like camera phone photography and social media. The author examines AI-generated images within the context of photography history, exploring technique, form, and function. She addresses the documentary function of photography, image resolution and filter effects, the surreal and real quality of photographs and AI-generated images, and the latter’s impact on representation and illusion.