Prediction isn't the same thing as hunger.
The strange thing about spending thousands of hours making images with artificial intelligence is that it made me fall in love with photography even more. That wasn’t what I expected, although looking back it probably should have been. If you spend enough time thinking seriously about AI, you’re inevitably forced to think seriously about creativity itself. I haven’t questioned why I make anything, photography or art, this much since I was twenty years old, and in many ways this body of work is less about artificial intelligence than it is about returning to those original questions.
I came to AI through fear, but fear has never stopped me exploring something before. I wanted
to understand it before deciding what I thought about it. I wanted to know whether it represented another tool in the history of image-making, or whether it really was the existential threat so many people believed it to be. More honestly, I wanted to know whether it could replace me. I don’t think there is a photographer alive who hasn’t asked themselves this same question. So I did what I’ve always done when I don’t know what I think: I started making work.
Through thousands of prompts and thousands of failures, I spent hours trying to understand not simply what the machine could produce, but what kind of relationship I wanted to have with it.
I wasn’t interested in making clever demonstrations of AI. I wanted to see whether I could build a genuine creative practice with it and whether working with it could teach me something I didn’t already know.
It did, just not in the way I expected. The longer I worked with it, the less interested I became in the pictures it could produce, and the more fascinated I became by what it could never possess. It can imitate almost every visual language we’ve ever invented. It has absorbed centuries of painting, photography, sculpture, cinema, fashion and design, and can combine them into something that appears entirely new. It can generate beauty with astonishing ease, and it can even imitate originality. But it does not care whether the images exist at all.
AI has no investment in the work. It doesn’t wake up at three in the morning because an idea refuses to leave it alone. It doesn’t carry memories into a studio. It doesn’t bring heartbreak, grief, humour or embarrassment to the act of making. It doesn’t hope that someone might stand in front of something it has made and recognise a part of themselves. Instead, it predicts. Prediction isn’t the same thing as hunger, and that distinction has become more important to me than almost anything else.
That’s why this exhibition is called La F.AI.M.
“AI expands my imagination. Photography expands my humanity. Together, they’ve made me more curious.”
The title is obviously a play on AI, but that isn’t really what it’s about. It is the French word for ‘the hunger’, and somewhere along this process I realised that hunger has always been the driving force behind my work. Long before I knew anything about cameras, lighting or portraiture, there was simply an urge to make something. Success never really satisfies that feeling, and recognition doesn’t soften it. If anything, it motivates me further. Every artist I admire shares that same restlessness. They aren’t driven by certainty, but by the feeling that the next piece of work might finally be the one, the one that makes sense of me.
Of course, it never does, and another feeling swoops in to take its place. A picture doesn’t contain meaning in isolation, it only begins to mean something when someone else encounters it. The viewer completes the work. Which leaves me needing to create.
Photography taught me that you don’t begin with certainty, you begin with instinct: a suspicion that there might be something worth finding if you keep looking long enough. Strangely, so did AI. One of the biggest misconceptions surrounding artificial intelligence is that it somehow sits in opposition to photography. People constantly ask me whether one will replace the other, as though every technological change requires us to abandon whatever came before it, but history suggests the opposite. Photography didn’t kill painting, it liberated it. Once painters no longer had to describe the visible world with absolute accuracy, they became free to invent entirely new ways of seeing. Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism or Abstract Expressionism would not exist without photography arriving first.
Perhaps AI is asking exactly the same question of us now. Not, what can we do without it, but what can we do that we couldn’t do before. The answer, at least for me, isn’t to stop making photographs, but to make more of them, with and without AI. The more time I spent generating images, the more urgently I wanted to take real photos. AI expanded my imagination in directions I couldn’t have anticipated. Almost instinctively, it made me want to pick up a camera and stand in front of another human being.
Generating images and taking pictures couldn’t feel more different. Thanks to AI, standing opposite someone has never felt more extraordinary. It teaches you to embrace the conversation before the first frame, the awkwardness and the exchange of trust that happens when somebody forgets they’re being photographed.
Working with AI made me realise that this was never simply part of photography, it is photography. My practice has become plural. I no longer think in terms of replacement, but in terms of conversation. AI expands my imagination. Photography expands my humanity. Together, they’ve made me more curious than I’ve been for years. That plurality extends beyond the way the images are made, and explains why they had to become physical objects.
On a screen they remain digital files amongst millions of other digital files. They belong to an economy of endless attention where everything is designed to move on. Printing interrupts that rhythm completely, changing the scale, changing the pigment, changing the format. In object form the work asks something of the viewer: it invites you to move towards it, step away from it and spend time with it. It becomes less about technology and more about presence.
At that point, the question of whether it was generated by AI begins to matter less than the experience of standing in front of it. Authorship doesn’t disappear because a new tool has entered the process. If anything, it becomes more visible. Every decision, every reference, every question that led to the final image belongs to me. The machine helped me realise the work, but it didn’t tell me what was worth making.
When I started this journey I thought I was trying to understand artificial intelligence, but what I was really doing was rediscovering myself as a photographer. Not by rejecting the machine, but by understanding what it could never bring to the work. AI has become part of my practice and I can’t imagine giving it up. Equally, I’ve never wanted to take more photographs. The two now exist together, each making the other richer.
That’s what La F.AI.M. is about. Not the triumph of technology or the defence of photography, but the persistence of the thing that comes before both: the need to make something, to understand and to keep looking. The machine can generate images, but it can’t generate hunger. That part is still ours.
Writer Rankin
Image Credits Rankin
