> the photo is a medium of expression which is not that different from writing something. Yes, of course photography is an expression for the reasons you menti

> the photo is a medium of expression which is not that different from writing something. Yes, of course photography is an expression for the reasons you mention. When I see a documentary photograph, I know it's not the "whole picture" but just a moment lasting 1/200s and maybe 1 out of 500 photos that a photographer picked out. But I do assume that the moment I'm seeing did actually exist from that perspective, and that there are real limits to how the photographer can control the image. That claim to reality is all that documentary photography has to elevate it from artistic and illustrative photography. Here's an example (from the NFT AI Cuban project) of what gets lost when we treat realistic AI-generations on the same epistemic level of a traditional documentary photo https://twitter.com/SaabGT750/status/1643651637033017345 https://twitter.com/SaabGT750/status/1643651637033017345 Knowing that this photo is AI generated, what are we supposed to make from it? Of course the human pictured doesn't exist, but does this helmet actually exist as part of the Cuban refugee life, or is it purely an artifact of the AI's hallucination? Documentary work has been great at showing how fact is stranger than fiction — e.g. how during in war, people can have moments of laughter and goofiness. Treating AI photos and documentary work on equal footing ultimately erodes our understanding of how expansive and weird reality can be.