Photography and Artificial Intelligence

New York Times photography critic Gideon Jacobs published a column with the following title: “A.I. Is the Future of Photography. Does That Mean Photography Is Dead?” The query, as our seminar will suggest, strikes not just at photography’s very identity as a medium. It also serves as a proxy for larger questions about the apparent threat that artificial intelligence poses for the human imagination. This seminar will correspondingly explore the relationship between AI-generated photography and the subjective agency of authorship, creativity, intention, and perspective, which are understood to be involved in the making of technology-based images, a characteristic of photography.