THE DEBATE - October 12, 2026

00:00:00 Rubin: Hey, Suzanne.

00:00:01 Suzanne: Hey, Ruben. How are you doing?

00:00:03 Rubin: It's good. It's been a little while, hasn't it?

00:00:06 Suzanne: It has. About time. I think that just means it's about time we catch up.

00:00:09 Rubin: I don't know if anyone else wants to hear us. Catching up is the problem, but I figured we'll give it a. We'll give it a roll. A lot of lots happened in the world. Um. God, I can't even remember. I guess we we had, uh, talked to Drucker last time. That's where we were. Wow. That was a year. That was like a year and a half. Okay. Sorry, everybody. We've been we've been preoccupied.

00:00:32 Suzanne: Well, yeah. I mean, it is. It's true. Nothing like a good catch up, though, to really set the record straight. Uh, I mean, I think I actually think back to our conversations of what we'd had around, you know, kind of the integrity of an image and the belief in an image. And I think you and I, that was kind of one of our, our points. We didn't always necessarily align on. Um, for me, it didn't, it didn't matter as much if it was complete truth, it could be something that it could, I had a little bit more, I think flexibility in my definition of an image. Whereas I think you were really kind of strict and like any sort of alteration, it's no longer a photograph, which I mean, I also, I also can, can see the perspective of from like photojournalism.

00:01:16 Suzanne: Well, do you.

00:01:17 Rubin: Do you still hold to those ideas or have you changed anything this year?

00:01:21 Suzanne: I was actually more curious.

00:01:22 Suzanne: About your how you've changed.

00:01:24 Suzanne: Because I've become I've become.

00:01:26 Rubin: Far more intractable. I mean, I think that it's more important than it even was a year ago or two years ago to make these semantic and yeah, somewhat arbitrary lines in the sand that say that's not a photograph. There's a difference between images and photographs. A photograph is a very specific thing. And imaging is lots of things. There's lots of ways to make images in this world. We live with digital images and screen captures from video, and there's like, there's a million ways to make an image. It could be photoshopped, it can be completely AI. And I think trying to find the line between Photoshop and AI is going to kill you. And so I think that there's lines around what I think a photograph is. And while I do think that there's sort of, you know, fuzzy edges a little bit, there's gray zones around the edge, even though I'm trying to put a hard line on it, I don't think that invalidates the need to separate photography from the rest of imaging. And when I look at AI and if I had to, and if I had to define what is in that box, that's photography almost more than anything, it would be about its relationship to time. Time is the substrate that makes photography, photography. And if you divorce the image from time, it's just a kind of a painting. Because paintings are divorced from time, no one looks at a painting and think, oh my God, that's how that happened. It's like, you know, that it was created over a period of time and someone constructed all the things you see.

00:03:00 Suzanne: It's not.

00:03:00 Suzanne: A moment. It's where it was. I think photography is that moment.

00:03:04 Suzanne: But.

00:03:04 Rubin: It's more, I think a moment is to, um, to, uh, precise a line because if it's a, it could be a volume of time, you can leave the shutter open for, for ten minutes. It's still a chunk of time being compressed and flattened into this, this 2D piece of information, but everything that's in the frame was in that volume of time. You can't just take something out or put something in. Now, where it gets squirrelly is I do think you get to play with light. Photography is about the manipulation of light, but it's not about the manipulation of time. It's about the manipulation of light. So I can darken and lighten. I can do it in the camera. I can do it in post-production. And I know this is where people get squirrelly. How come I get to do that in post-production, but not at a bird? But it changes, but it changes the connection to time. Whereas changing the lighting doesn't change the connection to time in the same way that going back to it and adding something to it or taking something out of it meaningful, you can dust it. This is where I get you get to the edges. I think you could. Photographers would take dust out all the time and they might touch out something. And you might say that that does that invalidate it from being a photo? I don't know, that's where you kind of get to the edges. But I think as a rule, I really have to hold to the fact that the photograph is about time, and the minute you put something in that wasn't there, basically, or change it from what could really was in that moment, or whether it's a fraction of a second or 50s or a time lapse.

00:04:39 Suzanne: I guess I still.

00:04:40 Suzanne: I still feel like moment does hold because it could be, it could be a second, it could be ten minutes. But it is, you know, like when someone thinks back to a moment of their life, it doesn't necessarily mean it's a second, a specific second of their life. It's more of the the feeling of this.

00:04:55 Suzanne: But.

00:04:55 Rubin: It is more than the feeling because you remember that the photo that I also felt guilty about, where I put the birds back in that were there that we all saw.

00:05:03 Suzanne: But college application or something?

00:05:05 Rubin: No, it was around high school, but yeah, it was the burning car and the birds and I, and I feel like I was recreating something that really happened. And so one might argue that, okay, so I put them there, but they were there and people who were there saw birds doing this thing. I don't think that that alleviates the fakeness of it and takes it from it. Doesn't even have to. You don't have to call it fake. It just means it's not a photograph anymore. It's now this sort of photographic painting. If you've put these elements together to do the same thing that painters have done for generations, they put something where they want it in the way that they want it, and they control that very tightly. And the only way I could do that in a photo is if it's in a studio and I set things up, and that's legitimate. It still was a thing that, you know, there's a famous picture, um, of us, I can't remember the photographer and the whatever it is, it's um, Salvador Dali and he's, um, it's this.

00:06:08 Suzanne: Completely crazy.

00:06:09 Rubin: Abstract picture where there's a water splashing, a cat flying through the air. And while it's totally surreal, but it really happened like they threw the cat, like it really was a moment that was captured in spite of its artificiality in many other respects.

00:06:24 Suzanne: They also threw that cat like twenty times. It wasn't like this was the first take. It was a professional cat.

00:06:30 Rubin: It was a professional cat. Yeah. So I would say that that makes it distinct from if I went into my dark room and I got a cat and I put it where I want it, and I got the guy and I put it where I want it. The photos may be identical. At the end of the day, you're not. It's not about the end result. It is simply a definition, a semantic definition. That one is a painting and one is a photograph.

00:06:53 Suzanne: I guess for me it doesn't matter. I mean, like I keep coming back to like, unless it's photojournalism, why does it matter? I mean, it is, it is the, it is the perception. It is the view. It is the kind of artistic. I don't want to say memory because I know you're going to jump on that word, but it's like this idea. It's like it's their, it's their view of it's their capture of like what happened. And unless it's like, unless they're holding themselves to, to your standard of photojournalism, I feel like it is, it's about the, the, the beauty or the story that they're, that they're conveying. And that for me, it's okay if you added to it.

00:07:40 Rubin: I don't buy it. It's a painting because you get that from paintings. That's what paintings are that I'm trying to convey, a feeling. I'm trying to tell you the story of Washington crossing the Delaware. You know, it's like it's it is an artist's conception of something. And it doesn't mean it's not true. It's not like one is more true than the other. That's why I want to get away from authenticity or veracity, because you start getting down slippery slopes of whether photography has authenticity or since it's all a kind of a falsity, right? But you still need to make a distinction in the crafts that one is made by putting things together where you want them, and the other is through a simultaneity of of events that have been captured with, you know, various forms of synchronous stuff. Those are ideas about time. And you lose them when you just make something, it doesn't make it less art or less true. It just don't think it should be called a photograph because we judge photographs differently. You know, if you look at a photograph, that's funny. I find this totally true in the AI world. It's it's a perfect example because if I show you a video in AI, if I show you a video and you're like, that's hysterical. I can't believe that. Oh my God, I'm having an emotional reaction to you seeing that plane crash or, or the dog catch the thing in the air. And then later it's like, oh, I just made that. It's completely uninteresting. The fact that you made that doesn't make it just as delightful as that you noticed it or it happened out in the street. It is completely different, even though the images are the same. And I think AI pushes it to that, uh, sort of reductio ad absurdum. It takes it all the way to the point that you've invented everything and it looks like a photograph or a real thing. And I just think it we, we lose what is important about photography if we divorce it from time.

00:09:36 Suzanne: I think it depends on how the image is set up and communicated.

00:09:40 Rubin: I think.

00:09:40 Suzanne: You can't.

00:09:41 Rubin: You can't rely on metadata to explain that that's a photo. And that was fictional. Like paintings are self-evident, but like when you make a photorealistic painting, it's still one of the interesting things about it is that it's in that weird zone if it looks like a photo. But I realize it's been made over time and it's a painting or something like that, you don't get the benefit of that reversed. You don't look at a photo and feel like, oh my God, it's so interesting because it was faked, but it looks so real. It. It doesn't work the other way.

00:10:14 Suzanne: But I guess what I'm saying is how it's set up. It's not communicate like it's not the metadata that's communicating. It's like, where am I seeing this? Is it? You know, how is that? How am I, how am I coming upon this image? If it is on social media, I don't think my, my bar, as far as like what I assume is true is very low. I mean, now with there's just the capabilities from like from deep fakes to just like generative AI to how what we're creating, honestly, day to day in runway and how we, how we're communicating concepts, we, we are, we oftentimes will like kind of in the beginning of the deck will say like, you know, uh, directed by humans collaborated with AI or, you know, like, so we're acknowledging the images that we're creating are not necessarily found or they're not necessarily things that we've fully designed and like rendered out like built into three dimensional space. We will start there. But then it's very, um, actually we won't start there. We'll start our process for creating designs and creating worlds and creating spaces has changed so dramatically in the past year and a half, uh, where we used to rely on more photography, more imagery that had existed that had, you know, things that had been created before to kind of explain a new concept or help reference. It'd be kind of like this and kind of like this. And now we can actually completely change that. But we, we define that, we say define it.

00:11:43 Rubin: You set the context, you're showing it in a presentation. I don't have a problem with that because it's, it's illustrative. It's like, uh, when you have an artist's conception of something and you got to say, this is an artist's conception, we weren't really there. And you say that, but with things that look like photographs are so easily taken out of, taken out of context, that I can just look at the presentation and I grab that picture and I put it on my website like it's all done and nobody knows it doesn't exist there. And again, because it looks like a photograph, it will be radically misinterpreted. It loses its value because the value of a photograph is because it's a photograph, not just because if I showed you the Hindenburg thing and you're like, oh my God. And then you're like, oh, I mean, I just made that because it's cool looking it. And I know you're going to go back to photojournalism, but photos imply at some level that they're photojournalistic by their by what they are. I think we're we're playing.

00:12:45 Suzanne: Do we need a new term then? Do we need a new like instead of trying to cling on to this classic term, like language evolves, language is continues to change. And so this idea of like photography as a general, uh, as a general, like discipline or field, do you. Do we need to define what is like actual reality? Do we need to define like, is there some other terminology that we actually need to differentiate?

00:13:17 Rubin: It's not actual reality because we've accepted that the photographer, the photograph itself isn't actual reality. It has so much bias and so much construct. That's why it gets to be art. It's still art. Photography, I would argue is still art. It also has a craft associated with it, which is if you're a darker in person or a computer person. And in fact, AI and those have craft associated with them too. I don't dislike them. I'm a uelsmann fan. I believe in using AI and Photoshop to make product. I just can't accept that anyone would call it a photograph. And if we do, we erode what makes a photograph a photograph?

00:13:57 Suzanne: But instead of trying to fight the wave of general humanity, do you think you might have more success instead of like, okay, fine. Actual photography isn't the right word. Actual reality isn't the right word. But like, what would be some more words that you feel could apply? Like if you, if you were to say, okay, fine, I believe that this is this, that a, a square can be a rectangle, but a rectangle cannot be a square. But I need to define what I need to kind of come up with something new. So I can more clearly explain what I believe to be true of capturing a moment, capturing a moment of time.

00:14:37 Rubin: I see that, but I think that the word photograph is the best word for what it was. And what does that and this new stuff is more easily separated than coming up with some abstract, abstract new term that we apply to the craft of the time bound imaging that we have done for one hundred years, and separate that from the creative painting with light that we can do with this new malleable medium. You know, I love the malleable medium that is imaging. I think it's in the same way that I love painting and people do so many creative things with it. Uh, I embrace Photoshop for those things, having that kind of a tool. And, and I'm not even wedded to the analog nature of it. It's not about the, that this is, uh, done with film through a camera and that's done with a computer. Like, I'm not trying to make those kinds of distinctions. It's simply, I think it's this one idea that when you divorce an image from time, it becomes a painting.

00:15:40 Suzanne: What about like authentic exposure?

00:15:43 Rubin: You're never going to get people to use up these new words. I don't care how good you are at this. I don't think they're not going to say authentic, I mean pure. There is the term from the from the early modernists and the pictorialist world where they would call this pure seeing.

00:15:58 Suzanne: MM.

00:15:58 Rubin: And that was kind of an adjective like photography is pure seeing, Which meant, I guess, that if you could see it with your eyes and you held a camera, you could see it with the camera more or less. And that's different from the stuff that's constructed because there's no pure seeing of it. It only exists after you've built it up. And I know there are edges. I mean, look, we look at Ansel Adams and we always point to how much he manipulated his pictures. And in a lot of ways, his manipulations weren't a ton different than Jerry Uelsmann. You know, they they talked about the work they did in the darkroom, but I would still differentiate that that Adams for all the work he did in the darkroom, he didn't add things. You know, there was darkening. There was some retouching, I suppose, that we can get. But for the most part he was, he was not adding anything. There was maybe refining by darkening something. And whether you do it on the negative or not, you'll Uelsmann is literally making collages out of images, which I think is very nice way to think of painting with light. He's using this light medium and putting things together, and it's super creative. And the juxtapositions are about what the photographer has chosen to put together to create the meanings they want to create. But a photographer is like Cortege or Cartier-Bresson or, you know, and they aren't photojournalists, they're still doing art. But the art of photography is about noticing things that are real and seeing them in a different way, and capturing them in a way that is aesthetic and all that other stuff. And there's meaning in the juxtapositions, and there is a kind of element of luck that makes photography sort of photography that you don't control one hundred percent of it. And we lean into that luck, even though the the Pictorialists hated that the modernists had luck involved. They felt it wasn't art if there was luck involved. But I would say like more like Jackson Pollock. You can have a skill. It's still hard to do. He doesn't control exactly where everything falls, but he's in control of what it is. And so while there's an element of luck, it's not like it's just random. There's a difference between random and an element of luck. Photojournalists are taking a few different pictures, both to capture the moment, but also that everything's in the kind of right places in the frame in a way that, you know, those both of those make up what photography is. Um, and even studio photography, you know, there's lighting it and deciding how everything goes. It's still a real thing. It's a real scene, you know, and I think it's important to everybody who works with images to differentiate. And I would add that, as you know, I now think more than ever that photography is dead as a commercial enterprise, photography is dead. It is only the generating of an element that's used with all of your skills in computing and everything else for a client, for a commercial, photography is for a client, and you need to do everything you can to deliver on the goals of the client.

00:19:12 Suzanne: I would say just like painting, painting for like selling products is dead. We don't, you know, we kind of moved to photography. And now I do think that, but painting as art is still alive. Painting is sharing your perspective.

00:19:26 Rubin: And I think, no, I'm not saying I'm not saying that photography is an art is dead. I'm saying, I guess I should be clear. Paint photography as a commercial tool.

00:19:36 Suzanne: Is becoming more and more niche and is, is, is, is. You're right. It is, it's not, it's not going to be the way that most that the majority of businesses and companies are probably going to continue to move forward in, in its entirety. I think that I think it is still needed. And I think some will will say, hey, this is this is a this is an authentic capture. This is an authentic exposure. This is a time imprint or whatever it is, but it's like it actually wants to differentiate itself from this AI slop that we're seeing everywhere else that they can actually say, this is real. And this really happened. And I actually see brands moving in that direction. The same reason that so many of there's such a, such interest around like experiential right now, because there's people can't trust what they're seeing. They can't trust what is like they're, they're seeing and hearing in a video. They're not, they can't trust the images that are being presented to them, but they know that they can trust what's real and what's like really they're in front of them. So that's where I feel like there is this what, where I'm kind of getting to is like, I actually feel like there could be a really great opportunity to make sure that you're clarifying what is your definition of photography? And the more I say it like authentic capture, I really like you've, you've used those words multiple times in different, different framing. But I think that together they sort of they tell the story of like this, this was, this was a real moment in time. And this, it's a way to kind of add to your definition that that further defines what it is, because you will not be able to define what you believe. Photography is by only hanging on to this umbrella term. I think you really have to, uh, find something that will differentiate.

00:21:25 Rubin: Maybe it's an adjective like pure seeing or authentic capture. But, but again, if I'm a client and I have a job and there's, and I presume that I'm hiring a photographer to do this, if they come back to me and be like, that's the best I could do. Like the subject was moving, the light wasn't good. I'm like, then you're a crappy photographer. Like I needed to be this. And if you're not using every tool at your disposal, why would you purposely constrain what you do. For me, your client. Like I don't want you constrained. I want you to deliver. I might want it to look like a photo, but I still want it to be, you know, the way I want it to be. And I think that the we're relegating what is what I would call real photography, what's left of real photography. It's people who purposely decide to constrain themselves for the fun of doing it that way, for the art and the challenge of doing that. And that is like, it's like saying, is opera still exist? Well, yeah, they're still opera, but it's not like it was one hundred years ago where that's how you can ingest.

00:22:33 Suzanne: Media, consume stories, consume.

00:22:36 Rubin: You consumed opera, you consume celluloid projection of film, movies in theaters. That was a thing. Now, the fact that I can watch my movie like this on a little thing, you know?

00:22:47 Suzanne: Um, but does that not make it a movie anymore?

00:22:50 Rubin: Well, I'm not going to get into the movies. I'm not going.

00:22:52 Suzanne: To. I mean, you're the one that brought it up.

00:22:54 Rubin: Well, no, I just mean in the sense that the the the medium has changed. I, when I say that it's dead, I would say that opera is dead. But that doesn't mean you can't see an opera or that no one's making opera, but it's lost it being sort of the mass way that people consume stuff. And now it's a niche way that some people are into. And I think photography will be that what's left of real photography. And I'm using the term real. Now, real photography will be artists who want to lug around a camera, who want to develop film, who are okay with the constraints that that creates. And I think that that's going to get smaller and smaller. It's not going to go away because it is fun and people will pass it down and whatever. But imaging is by definition fake. It's modified, it's computational, it's improved. it's so divorced from time and reality that I don't think it's useful to think of it as just another kind of photography. It has to be another thing. You don't confuse painting with photography, and painting is done with paint, but sometimes it's done with other media. You still call it painting. I think what we would call what people used to call photography, they might have said was painting with light or, you know, freezing a shadow. Those were ideas of how they described it. Um, I think when you're actually painting with light and you're divorcing it from time, you're, you're more painting than photographing.

00:24:29 Suzanne: And I guess I'd just get back to the, for me, it keeps coming back to, does it matter? And so for you, it matters because you have a very strict definition of what this is. And I don't I, I'm open to that, but I feel like this episode is going to be like Suzanne and Ruben get back together and argue.

00:24:48 Speaker 5: And cannot agree. No no no.

00:24:50 Rubin: Okay, so I have thousands of photos from the twentieth century here.

00:24:54 Speaker 5: Right.

00:24:54 Rubin: And if you are a kid today looking at images and you are presented with these, it would they might not seem very interesting because they're not very dramatic or they might, you might not understand that these are fundamentally different from generated images. They just look like images. And I don't think you can have any appreciation for twentieth century photography growing up in this world, unless you understand this medium is fundamentally different from what the images that you're looking at are. And if you just say that those are old time photographs and these are new time photographs, I think you're losing. You will lose what people understand or appreciate about pure seeing photography, real photography that has been crafted.

00:25:41 Suzanne: And I love that you're using that extra definition.

00:25:43 Speaker 5: I'm trying.

00:25:44 Suzanne: That is exactly it.

00:25:45 Speaker 5: I'm trying it on. It's not bad.

00:25:47 Suzanne: I fully I fully agree with you, just like someone. If you use this as an analogy to studying anything opera, painting, whatever. It's by going in and knowing like the nuance of like, okay, eighteen eighteenth century painting and like, why was that really relevant? And what were some of like, even the technologies that were changing the way that, you know, paint was drying or colors that were being used or things like that. Okay. So I, I think that you're saying like when we're going back and looking at these photographs, you're like, this was, this is pure seeing. This is actual.

00:26:21 Rubin: Okay, let me try this on. Okay. And I'm just playing. I haven't even.

00:26:24 Speaker 5: Thought.

00:26:25 Suzanne: I know, I know, this is this is what I like. We're just figuring it out.

00:26:28 Speaker 5: If I, if.

00:26:29 Rubin: I use a CNC machine that can cut marble.

00:26:33 Speaker 5: Mhm.

00:26:34 Rubin: And I can now make a David out of a block of marble in about 30s and in fact, tweak it up so he has glasses on. Okay. Michelangelo's David. And now it looks identical to David, although he's got the glasses on. Is it a sculpture? Is it a sculpture in the same way that David's sculpture is? It is it is the term sculpture the right word for that thing? As opposed to the thing that Michelangelo carved out of a block of rock? Is it even if I showed them both to you and you're like, well, that one's pretty good. The one with the glasses. I kind of like you could like it. But are we doing ourselves a disservice to just think that that's the same as the block of rock that was carved?

00:27:16 Suzanne: I think you're equating craft with point of view, and that's not the same. I think that because it can be made, does not mean it's like someone looking at a Jackson Pollock and saying, oh, I could do that. It's not it's not the same as having the point of view of like, how he was changing art. He was painting canvas on the floor. He was dripping paint. No one had really done that before. And so I think just because the craft of I can, I can replicate what this artist did. It isn't. It isn't the same.

00:27:45 Rubin: I'm not saying it's not. It's art. You're saying, what is it, art or not? That's what that description is. And I'm saying it may be art, but is it sculpture? If nobody made it. If a machine made it. If I can inkjet with oil paint on a canvas and can draw a picture. And it makes this incredibly big oil painted canvas, but I don't have any craft to it. And it was done very quickly. Is it fair to call it a painting? Is it something else?

00:28:16 Suzanne: Or painting is something that is the nature of the materials that are used. In this case. I feel like you are proving my point of like photography is this umbrella where it is a it is, it is, you know, light painting. It is shadow capture, shadow freezing. You know, it is, it is, it's like kind of defining the medium. So by nature, yes, I would say this CNC five axis milled marble of David with glasses is in fact a sculpture by definition of, you know, kind of like the most basic definition. It's a what is it.

00:28:48 Rubin: Object that can sit.

00:28:49 Suzanne: On a carved object or an idea made present through matter, form and space. Like it is something that is that exists beyond a two dimensional plane.

00:28:59 Rubin: Yeah, I may have hurt my own argument. Okay. Keep going.

00:29:01 Suzanne: I keep talking, keep talking, I love it.

00:29:05 Rubin: Maybe that isn't the right metaphor, because it is because I don't think anything in the definition of sculpture is about the craft of it. Perhaps. But I do think that the definition of photography isn't about the craft, but is about time. That's why I'm separating it. If it was just about the craft, then it would be a lot easier to say that all these computer things are not the same. But then you're on that slippery slope that, like the craft, has changed over one hundred years. It used to be a daguerreotype and you're you got oil and chemicals and now it's a lot easier. And then in nineteen hundred, it's even Rolls of film, and then it's digital, like the craft and the ease. And because of that, I think you might argue about it being art. Like I think part of art is the craft and the difficulty and the originality and stuff like.

00:29:51 Suzanne: That point of view. For me, art is a point of view.

00:29:54 Rubin: And point of view. Yeah. But so, so both the AI versions and the, the camera versions, I would argue, could both be art. They can be. I'm not excluding that. I'm only saying it's a different art form and not just a, a kind of photography. I believe it's a different art form and should have its own name. So it's judged in the proper context. If you pull it out of time, particularly if it's not evident that you pulled it out of time, you know, Uelsmann stuffs pulled out of time. But it's self-evident that it's it's that thing. It's when it's imitating something that we all come to understand as being something connected to time, we will destroy what what real photography is because of all this imaging? Because if people don't connect it to time, they won't appreciate the amazing synchronicity of some of the things that have been captured. You'll just think someone just put that there and it will erode with you.

00:30:54 Suzanne: But I think that's why if you can, you can't hold on to this umbrella term of photography and expect everyone else to get on board with you. I think if you really want to differentiate what makes it unique, unique, and not a digital painting or an altered image that is using the technique of captured light, at some level, I think this idea of authentic capture or, you know, real seeing, I think that it almost needs to be like the adjective before photography. And then it does differentiate it. Then I think we are, we're aligned. And I think that maybe that is as language continues to evolve and grow, that is okay.

00:31:33 Rubin: Okay, I'm going to hang. I'm going to stick with the fight for a second longer here.

00:31:37 Suzanne: Okay?

00:31:37 Rubin: Because the problem with real seeing to me is that photography is an abstraction. Like nobody sees a photograph, you don't see a fraction of a second or a volume of time. And so this idea that what we're seeing is real.

00:31:52 Suzanne: What do you mean no one sees a photograph?

00:31:56 Rubin: Time is contiguous. It flows, it moves. I was standing out looking at stuff, and things are all moving around in the world. Uh, I never saw things all lined up in that perfect way. They don't just stop lined up, they're all moving around. But if I shoot it and they're frozen and they have a certain orientation with each other, that's the delightful surprise of look at the coincidence of the moon is right above the chapel top, which is where right where the bird was flying in. It is imperative that that be locked to time. And if you again, I think it's the only thing. If I had to pick one thing out of everything, not not the medium, not the craft. If you just have to define photography, it is about a connection to time. And if you take it out of that, it's something else that's, I'm going to die on that hill.

00:32:46 Suzanne: And I feel like, I feel like you're, we're on different parts of the same hill. I actually don't think that. I just think you're trying to say that is what photography is. And you're trying to claim a term that has like that is that is evolving. And I think if you want to claim that portion of it, which I one hundred percent agree with you. I one hundred percent agree with you that it is a captured moment. It is a it is witnessed, it is recorded. It is, you know, and again, authentic capture maybe where you don't like real seeing is.

00:33:18 Speaker 6: I don't like authentic.

00:33:19 Suzanne: That.

00:33:19 Speaker 6: Moment. I'm worried about.

00:33:20 Rubin: Authentic, I guess authentic to the term capture, but it's not authentic in the sense that it has more authenticity in a philosophical way than the thing I've painted. They both reveal a truth. They both are creations. The thing that's authentic is that the moment was real, that it was really a piece of time. That's what's authentic. And I think it's too easy.

00:33:42 Suzanne: It preserved instant.

00:33:44 Rubin: It is. If you use the term authentic, you're going to get people fighting you on the authenticity of photography. And I don't want to go down that road.

00:33:50 Speaker 6: Mhm.

00:33:51 Rubin: You know what I mean? Because photography.

00:33:54 Speaker 6: Isn't authentic.

00:33:55 Suzanne: Why don't we do this? Why don't we put together? You and I can talk kind of off air. We can put together a few options, multiple choice. And we can see if, if listeners want to vote and we can just see what comes back and we can talk about it on our next episode.

00:34:08 Speaker 6: I think that's a good idea.

00:34:10 Suzanne: I mean, I'm actually really interested. Obviously, we're both passionate and enthusiastic. I do love language, I love art, I love things that are that are, you know, continuing to change. So I feel like for me, this is also a really interesting topic because we are continuing to change and the power of creating visual imagery has never been easier, but it's also been it's never really been more dangerous. You know, we talked about this on one of our early episodes where people didn't know how they couldn't trust the visual, and when they went to the movie theater and saw that train rushing at the screen, they actually all ran out of the theater thinking it was so real it was going to crush them. And now look where we've come. But there's still that, that belief when we, we, we are, we're kind of approaching the future with a little bit of a lost naivete of, you know, what we can trust and what we can't, but we still want to trust. And so I think we're, we're in an interesting place right now, even over the next six months, what will happen?

00:35:17 Rubin: Well, we had talked about this maybe a year ago. And we've we've confronted this as, as Photoshop became AI. Right over. Right. We've been doing this show before. AI was people conversing about it, and we were looking down the road of what was about to happen. And we predicted what I believe is kind of the case now, which was photography for one hundred years, kind of gave this this sense of authenticity unless proven otherwise. And now people no longer presume an image is real. Intellectually, intellectually, they don't presume it's real. But you still have that visceral response when you see a picture of a dog jumping up and catching a Frisbee and it's a twenty foot jump. There's still the sense of like, wow. Oh, yeah. The next thought very quickly is, I wonder if that's real? It probably isn't. You know what I mean? The bar is much higher. Um, I think that Segways a little bit into, you know, I was thinking about all the technological changes in photography over the years, but but I think I've missed something as I thought about that, because I dwell on the changes of the the craft. Yeah. And instead started looking at the changes in the consumption, like one hundred years ago when you saw there weren't a lot of places to see photographs, to experience an image. People lived very imageless. They had a few daguerreotypes of their family or whatever on the mantel. But for the most part, um, and then magazine and offset printing came around at the turn of the century and grew into the twenties, and then cameras got easier to use. And, and so there's more images. It was closer to professional only, although a hobbyist could do it. And there were tons of them. Uh, it had utility and because it had utility and because it was, it had this distribution medium, people had an experience of a photo because it was curated highly and it was in that magazine. And they weren't a million images all over the place. But now not just everyone taking pictures, but we're all looking at pictures at so many of them? Yeah. I think what merits being a photograph has being an art photograph has risen tremendously. Like it's no longer enough just to show me something cool like that just doesn't cut it anymore. There's too many images. It has to be something greater than that. The moment the the composition, something else has to supersede just one of the ten million pictures that I take that everybody takes. And I think for photography to remain an art, you're going to have the uelsmann type of, of artists who just make these incredible, beautiful, manipulated images. And then you have photographers. I'm using the term again, who are the pure seers who just continue to show us the world in a way that we didn't know was there, even though we all look at the same stuff, they're showing us something we hadn't seen in a new way. And I think that That's what becomes of photography. And all the imaging is something else. It's entertainment. It's, uh, it's commercial because it's designed to get us to do stuff. There are clients and money involved and, uh, and I'm pushing myself just into the domain of like, this is a practice like archery, like tea making like any of the little not tea, but like ENSO or whatever, where I'm doing it because it's a thing and it, it has, it's connected to time. It involves a craft. It's probably slower.

00:38:57 Speaker 7: You love, you love it because of its.

00:38:59 Suzanne: Constraints, even though there is a way that you could create something that maybe is free of, that you actually enjoy putting those constraints on it. And it is about seeing. It's about having a point of view. I like what you said, where you said photographers that are in the, in the world right now are showing us moments that we wouldn't have normally seen on our own, whether that is an epic, you know, An epic thing or it's a really small moment. I think that's a really nice way of phrasing it. It's showing us moments that we wouldn't have seen on our own.

00:39:31 Rubin: But it only is important if you don't think that is AI generated or photoshopped to the point of of falsity of the moment.

00:39:40 Suzanne: That's what it's only important then. But I think it does add an extra layer of. It's just that is what is differentiating it from like a digital, you know, digital art, something like that. But I think what we should do, actually, I think it's time we kind of wrap it up. Okay. Okay. We've talked about a lot. I know we're both very energized. I think let's put our top four or five options in the speaker notes, and we'll see what people vote on, because I'm genuinely curious to hear which what we land on. And I know you and I need to argue about this off air to actually get to our top five.

00:40:13 Rubin: Well, I think there's going to be there's going to be a handful of photographers who still work in film, and they're going to take my side, and there's going to be ten Photographers who are commercial and they make their living from this and they're totally on your side. They don't want to be excluded from being photographers.

00:40:28 Suzanne: So I mean, let's, let's just, we, we will, we will find out what the people say. Uh, it is time we wrap it up. So our show is recorded and produced in San Francisco and Santa Fe. Go to neomodern dot com slash podcast to get show notes, see photos, and post comments. And don't forget to subscribe on whatever service you're listening to us on. And please leave reviews and ratings. Don't forget to vote.

00:40:52 Rubin: We get new listeners from you telling your friends and spreading the word. I can't believe people still listen to this even when we're not making shows. It's very cool. Uh, if you know someone who might get something from us, send them the link to this. Thanks to Mitchell Foreman for our theme music and all of you for hanging out. Appreciate the attention. We hope we've given you some a lot of stuff to think about.

00:41:12 Suzanne: Until next time.