A few years ago I experimented with photographing flowers in the style of Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989). I wanted to capture something like this (Calla Lily, 1984).
I spent hours finding the right flower and setting up the lighting to get a black&white image I was happy with. Then I’d spend more time in Adobe Lightroom to adjust the image and bring out more detail and create a dramatic image. The best I could do was this:
Yesterday I tried to replicate that process using Midjourney and playing with various prompts. What took me hours previously now took about 10 minutes. Here are some of the images I created:
To me these are indistinguishable from Mapplethorpe’s pictures, and better than what I tried to create manually. I could probably show these to people and get a ‘wow, those are great pictures’ reaction. So if it’s indistinguishable from ‘manual photography’, is it still photography?
I’m sure a similar question was asked when photography first started: “If it didn’t take hours of painting with a brush to create an image, is it still art?” Photography has now been considered an art form for a long time and nobody disputes that just because it speeds up the creation of images. Is AI-powered image generation at the same stage now? Will it also turn into an accepted form of art that commands high prices at auctions? I’m curious to see where this is going.
Snapshots For Sore Eyes 
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