Artificial intelligence can now generate photorealistic images from just a few lines of description. Entire scenes, faces, and moments—none of which ever existed—can be rendered in seconds. As a technical achievement, it’s astounding. However, as someone who photographs with film, processes negatives by hand, and prints in a home darkroom, I find it disconcerting.
We’re entering an era when seeing is no longer believing. When images are detached from reality, from time, from place. In that context, a silver-based image from a negative feels like a statement. A form of resistance.
Trust in photography has been under threat ever since digital emerged as a new technology. AI is pushing that threat to a whole new level. Previously, an image captured with a digital camera (be it an SLR or iPhone) was still, at one time, pointed at something in the real world. That constraint has been removed entirely.
My own photography is grounded in the physical world. I shoot black and white film—mostly medium format and 4x5—and I print every image myself. The process is slow. Sometimes frustrating. But always real. When I hold a negative, I know where I was, what light was falling, and how long I waited. The silver particles on that film were touched by light that touched the subject. That’s not data. That’s presence.
My subjects are often landscapes, wildflowers, and the marks we leave behind—initials carved in stone, weathered fences, patterns worn into trails. I’m drawn to these because they carry time in them. Even wildflowers, which most people associate with vivid colour, have a quiet beauty in black and white: the curve of a stem, the tension in a petal, the space between blooms. They’re fragile and fleeting, and film lets me record them without pretending they’re permanent.
Photography, for me, has always been a way of saying: I saw this. It was here. I was too. That act of witnessing feels more important now, as we navigate a world flooded with synthetic imagery. AI can invent. But it can’t remember.
A negative remembers. It holds light, shadow, and time in a way no algorithm can.
That’s why I still shoot film. Because it’s slow. It’s physical. It’s honest.
Because it’s real…