Fred Ritchin: Challenges and Possibilities of the Digital and AI Revolution

Fred Ritchin is Dean Emeritus of the International Center of Photography School. He has been picture editor of the New York Times Magazine and has curated numerous exhibitions and collaborations with humanitarian organizations. He is the author of four books on photography. His newest book, The Synthetic Eye, is forthcoming in 2024.

HM: You’ve given a lot of thought to photography’s role in the world and how it’s changed over time. You recently marked 50 years in the industry — what are your biggest takeaways?

FR: I think the credibility of the photograph as a witness has been extraordinarily diminished over time. I don’t think the photographic community has done very much to resist that. The introduction of software 40 years ago, with Scitex machines and so on, which preceded Photoshop, did a lot to accelerate that movement away from photography as a recording of the visible and into something that’s quite malleable. There’s been a transition from optical photography to computational photography — so that for example in cell phones, the software “enhances” the image without your knowledge so that the colors are different, skin tones are more vibrant — and that makes it more of a consumer product, in which the consumer is meant to be pleased according to corporate wisdom (or lack thereof).

Now with artificial intelligence, you don’t even need a camera anymore, you just come up with anything you want. Generative fill with the new Photoshop from Adobe is a hybrid in which you start with a photograph. You can photograph somebody and put them anywhere in the world. So I don’t think what we’re talking about anymore is photography. It’s an imaging device that’s computational, synthetic, consumer-oriented, and has not a lot to do with what we thought of in the twentieth century as photography.

This is why there are almost no iconic photographs, why so much of social media is disputing any image one way or another. In 1984 in The New York Times Magazine I wrote that in the near future we won’t be able to know whether an image is fiction or nonfiction without asking the photographer, and unfortunately that’s pretty much where we are.

I think on the positive side we have photo books, thousands of them. We have a lot more interest in autonomous design, independent design, and alternative strategies.

HM: What do you think the community can be doing? What do you see as the way forward?

FR: I think if photography has a documentary function, then there has to be the integrity of the photographer as the author of the image – who knows the context, who doesn’t just arrive with a camera and point it, but actually knows the meaning of what they’re photographing. Who knows enough about a place to have a sense of whether an image is representative or not. That’s the way to differentiate oneself from somebody making hundreds and hundreds of images, one after the other, without really knowing what they're looking at. In this sense, photography is elevated into a place where the photographer has to be considered the author, not just the supplier of imagery, which is a good thing. But with it comes greater responsibility.

Just like with writers, everybody could write an email, but not everybody could write a novel. There are billions of amateurs with cameras, and the chances of them being at the right place at the right time for a news event is much greater than a professional. I think it's necessary more and more that the person working professionally as a visual journalist differentiates themselves from people who are simply making images on their cell phones by creating work that is much more in-depth, complex, and thorough. You have to have strategies that are more thoughtful.

Then you can work with an editor to contextualize it with the right kind of caption, the right kind of design, the right kind of images around it. Should it be a sequence, an essay? Does it need audio, video? They work with you to help you articulate it the best way you can. It can also be very useful to integrate imagery by people with cell phones where relevant and where credible. Those images can be enormously important in giving more background and insight.

HM: What else do you think photographers can do to deal with this, especially photojournalists?

FR: One idea is that photographers should publish their code of ethics on their website. So if you look up a photographer, it says, for example, “I’m a photojournalist. I do not stage imagery and pretend that it's spontaneous. I do not manipulate in post-production. I take detailed notes.”

I think in general, what we need is more and more transparency from the photographer. We need more context, we need an ethical code that makes sense, and a sense of integrity. For example, X photographer makes images in Gaza. Maybe I could click to their website and see that this person is a doctor in Gaza and has worked there for 12 years and is photographing from that point of view inside a hospital. These things are helpful in providing a sense of context around the fraction of a second in which the photograph was made.

When I was working on an exhibition of Magnum photographs done over 40 years of history, it occurred to me that if each photograph is taken at more or less a hundredth of a second, we're only seeing four seconds of 40 years of history. That's not very much, and the more context we get, the better. I'm a big believer in photo essays with multiple images, not a single image, whenever possible. Including interviews and diaristic impressions can also help. There are many ways of doing things beyond just making a single image and handing it in with a short caption.

HM: You’ve made interesting points in your writing about the relationship between the photographer and the publication, and how sometimes there’s this distortion where the article is not telling the reader the whole story. For instance, in Gaza, a lot of pictures are of people getting killed, but there’s no deep effort to illuminate what this conflict is all about.

FR: There’s a difference between photographing symptoms versus the systems that underlie them. Somebody gets killed, it's dramatic. But why are they getting killed? It’s the systems underneath it that cause it.

Many editors are just looking for the spectacle. I think that makes pretty much all the wars and conflicts pretty interchangeable. What’s the difference between a Shia and a Sunni in Iraq, or between Hamas and other Palestinians who live in Gaza – do we ever figure that out? Photojournalism becomes very reactive, waiting for graphic violence. But it's not often very proactive in terms of what you can do to avoid violence, diminish violence, understand violence, or heal from violence.

Fred Ritchin (right) in a panel discussion titled “Can Photography Still Be Helpful in the World?” with photographer Sasha Maslov and Magnum Photos Editorial Director Giulietta Palumbo. Photo by Emily Pederson.

I find photography, unlike other media, is still very much stuck in the 1930s, when they introduced small cameras and faster films. I think of the Spanish Civil War, and Robert Capa’s phrase, “If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough”. I think often you have to be further away to understand things. And you have to be asking questions as opposed to just trying to provide answers.

HM: Aren't the photographers also in the hands of editors and clients, who want certain pictures? They know what their client wants.

FR: It's always been a problem in all kinds of journalism. Why do we know so much about these West Bank conflicts with settlers and we know so little about, for example, Israeli peace groups? Why is it that the violence leads and the attempts at reconciliation are marginalized or left out? That's a problem in the field. 

How do you deal with it? When I was a picture editor, I would do my best to incorporate multiple perspectives and not concentrate on the violence, or on just one aspect of a situation. I think there's lots of ways of getting at it. People publish books, they do exhibitions, they work for alternative groups, they form cooperatives. An Egyptian former student of mine just worked with another photographer from the Middle East to publish a zine of nine Palestinian photographers. It appeared during Paris Photo and now it's going into libraries and collections. They're making a statement that Palestinians are often different from the ways in which they're depicted in Western media, and here's an alternative.

I think there's always going to be these issues and problems. But there are good editors and good publications. There are enormous numbers of cooperatives now of photographers from different regions putting on their own exhibitions, showing who they are differently. I think there has to be more and more of that kind of resistance.

HM: It's important for editors to not ask for stereotyped images, for images to conform to a preconceived idea.

FR: That’s it. As a picture editor, at times I would say, “Okay, photograph what I need for the magazine, but surprise me also. Show me what I don’t know and then hopefully I'll get it published. But don't just go and photograph the writer in front of the bookshelf every time.”

In the last few decades, there's been a growing awareness to not just send photographers from Europe and US to all over the world, but to work more with the local photographers with different points of view — which of course can be diminished by news outlets that don't take them seriously, that just want a certain kind of image. So I think we are making considerable progress, but unfortunately there's still stereotyping that goes on, and it certainly doesn't help the world to understand what's going on.

HM: You recently curated a very powerful show about Ukraine. How did you put that together?

FR: A former student and teaching assistant of mine, Ira Lupu, is Ukrainian, and within a few days of the Russian invasion we decided we needed to do an exhibition. We did not want the exhibition to define Ukrainians by violence and war, but we wanted it to give a sense of the culture of the people. It's unfair to just concentrate on the violence in pursuit of spectacle.

Ukrainian Perspectives: Photography from the 1940's–Now, a photography and multimedia exhibit curated by Fred Ritchin and Ira Lupu. ChaShaMa, New York, April 2023. Photo by Emily Pederson.

We worked with both Ukrainian photographers and artists, as well as other photojournalists. The first time, we did it at The Gallery at Dobbin Mews in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a gallery belonging to friends. Then we did it again more recently in Chelsea, and included Magnum photographers going back to the 1940s — Robert Capa, Herbert List — to give a sense of the impact of history and culture in Ukraine. We used an empty space from ChaShaMa, which is a real estate company, and worked with an NGO so people could buy prints. All of this we did with little money. Whatever money we had, we first tried to pay the Ukrainian artists, because they were being dislocated and losing their jobs.

Strikingly, there's no major museum in New York, other than the Ukrainian, that has done any exhibitions on the current conflict in Ukraine, as far as I know. To me that's a real pity — that we had to borrow a space to do it, when it's a massive war that’s changing the course of history. So we're not really responding culturally in vigorous ways to what's going on. We had about 300 people at the openings, so there is certainly public interest. But why in 2023 are we having to find alternative spaces to deal with a huge contemporary conflict?

HM: I've been living in New York for over a decade and sometimes I've felt this sense of, where are the exhibits that are really grappling with the major issues of our time?

FR: That's a good question.

HM: I'd love to delve more into what you see as the role of iconic images in inciting change.

FR: I think the last major iconic photograph internationally was in 2015, of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old boy from Syria who was trying with his family to escape and drowned. That’s eight years ago now and I'm not sure we're going to see another big iconic photograph at this point because we don't have hierarchical media anymore which tell you what's going on. It's social media that has so many dissenting voices making it difficult for iconic imagery to emerge.. 

There were recently two photographs published by the BBC of Omar and Omer, a Palestinian boy and an Israeli boy, who were both four years old and killed in the early days of this horrible conflict in October. On social media it was said that Omar, the Palestinian boy, was actually just an image of a doll, not a boy. His mother had to say no, that's my child who died. The Israeli boy, Omer, was accused on social media of being a crisis actor, hired along with his sisters to act out being dead, when in fact it was reported that his whole family had been massacred.

Compare that to the girl being napalmed in Vietnam. Nobody said she was a crisis actor. Nobody said she was a doll. There was a respect for the image, for her. It was all sacred in a way. The image was on the front page. Now what would they do to undermine it on social media?

There are very few common reference points anymore. The democratization of the media — which in many ways is helpful because you get multiple perspectives — has turned into an image war, which is horrifically vicious. So I don't know if any single image is going to rise above it to unite people because even a picture of two four-year-olds who were killed can be used and weaponized. I never would have imagined that the world would get to such a place. These are things we have to deal with.

I think it is indefensible that corporations have introduced all these softwares and AI systems without sufficient regulation in place and governments and legal bodies have done so little to constrain their excesses. Social media platforms are not publishers, so they can put lots of things online that an actual magazine or newspaper would never do, because they'd be sued or they'd lose their readership. Governments, legal bodies, media literacy, and education are all way behind what's going on — even though I've personally been writing about issues in digital media for 40 years, so I know it's nothing new.

I think it's also our fault for not paying for media. Very few people subscribe to newspapers and magazines the way they used to. As a result, everybody wants stuff for free, everybody has an opinion, and everybody's a publisher. And to me, the result is disastrous at this point.

HM: You’ve been working on efforts to establish more the line between AI and actual photographs. You've created an organization working on that.

FR: Recently we did the Writing with Light campaign with World Press Photo, Magnum Photos, National Press Photographers Association, and others. What we're saying is, you can't trust the camera, it's no more reliable than a pen or a typewriter or a computer for a writer. You have to trust the photographer as the author, that what he or she is photographing is not heavily manipulated, synthetic, or distorted in any substantial way. That's where our effort has gone.

There are other efforts to put watermarks on pictures, such as that the camera has a cryptographic signature on it — where and when it was taken, any changes made to the image. But to me, if you start registering any changes to an image then you're giving the reader potentially the right to keep clicking and find every change you made to an image. As a writer, if I do an interview, I'm not going to allow a reader to click and see the entire transcript. You have to trust the integrity of the writer, the editor, the editorial process.

I think these kinds of cryptographic safeguards, for insurance purposes, forensic purposes, can be very useful. For editors, it can be very reassuring to see that somebody's GPS says they were in the place they said they were, and so on. But I think above all, we really have to be able to trust the human being, the photographer, to do the right thing.

HM: I was reading an article in The New York Times about 1.7 million refugees from Afghanistan that are now residing in Pakistan, and all of them have to leave within one week. The Times did one article, and that's it. There was nothing else, no television, no other coverage.

FR: I agree, but not too long ago, you also found local newspapers sending photographers to El Salvador, to Vietnam, to different places to understand what's going on. We don't have local newspapers anymore for the most part. They're out of business. That's a problem because we end up with The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and just a few major outlets. There are so few publications with the financial underpinning to do their own reporting, and if they don't cover it, lots of people are made invisible. Ukraine was all over the news for a while, now Gaza is all over the news, again for a while. There's a big world out there that's not being covered at all. Not to say that the coverage of Ukraine or Gaza was always illuminating, but at least it existed. I think that's why we have thousands of photo books coming out — albeit with relatively few copies printed, but photographers need outlets to publish and there are so few outlets now. Almost nobody's going to give you a two- or three- or four-week assignment. There's not the money for it.

Tarweedah, a zine of 9 Palestinian photographers: Maeh Hammad, Randa Shaath, Samar Abu Elouf, Sameh Rahmi, Tanya Habjouqa, Samar Hazboun, Ameen Kaseem, Lina Khalid, and Nadia Bseiso.

HM: Exactly. We're losing voices because of the lack of support.

FR: We're completely losing voices. What worries me is not only the photographer's voices, but also the people in the pictures. Many years ago I was on the West Bank and I tried to get a story published on the people coming from New York City, the very militant young Jewish guys who were becoming mayors of West Bank towns. It felt like a kind of imported extremism at that time. Nobody wanted to publish it. That was in the early 1980s, and there's a sense that we needed to know these things at the time, because look what's happened 40 years later.

You have to be proactive. You can't just do breaking news all the time. You have to understand the context. Otherwise we just end up in a world that seems chaotic and out of control and it depresses everybody and makes it very hard to have a sense of a common good and work together constructively to make things happen.

Photographers really need the support to do projects and then help to get them published, so they don't just end up focusing on the violence in the West Bank, but instead try to get at the issues behind it and who gets hurt and what's going on, perhaps in their reporting even envisioning a more just outcome.

HM: It’s interesting you say that because I think even people in Israel didn't know much about what was happening in the West Bank.

FR: I'm not surprised. When I was at the New York Times over forty years ago, the criticism was that Harlem was being covered based on violence and drugs, but we didn't know the culture of Harlem. We didn't know about music, fashion, sports, or schools. We didn’t know the families. We didn't know about daily life, essentially, and it was right next door. That changed for the better, but often there is still a terrible concentration on the most extreme things in the news media. Everything has to be exceptional and spectacular. I think that's a lazy and irresponsible way to report on other human beings.

HM: There is a big sense in the community of photographers that it's too difficult to make a living as a photographer now, with editorial work having dried up more and more.

FR: It's extraordinarily difficult. Plus, if you're publishing on Instagram, you can't do layouts. You can't control the typography. You don't have a double page picture. You don't have in-depth accompanying text. You can't control the scale, have one big picture next to a small picture. 

We've given that up pretty much, and it's to our detriment, because if you look at the picture magazines — LIFE magazine, Look magazine, and so on — it was quite different to have eight pages on a subject where it’s all laid out coherently, and it would have an impact. After Eugene Smith's Nurse Midwife photo essay was published in 1951, readers gave enough money so that this solitary African American midwife in South Carolina was able to build a new clinic, and she was able to train 400 other midwives. It’s quite wonderful that a photo essay can lead to the building of a clinic. 

We’ve given much of this up. Now with AI, it's even more urgent that we have some parameters of what's possible, strategies to help change the world for the better. It's almost like we're purposefully rendering ourselves blind to what's happening.

HM: You're also in teaching and you've done a lot of work forming future generations. What do you think people need to be pushed to create the most nuanced work they can?

FR: If you're studying poetry, you certainly don't want to just copy Walt Whitman or some other poet. You want to have your own voice. And I think if you're studying photography, you don't want to necessarily just copy Robert Capa or Cartier Bresson or Diane Arbus or somebody like that.

You want to have your own voice, and to do that, you need to experiment. You need to take risks. You need to do things differently. Hand the camera to the person you're photographing. See what they do. Try the enormous array of digital tools, audio, video, nonlinear narratives. Make pictures intuitively so as to surprise yourself. Keep a diary along with your photographs. Learn how to sequence them in a variety of ways until you are satisfied that they are saying what you want them to say.

I think generally a problem is that people often want to do what others have done to be accepted. Given the state of the industry, which is collapsing in many ways, I think we need new voices and new ways to make images that have a greater resonance. My great satisfaction in teaching is that young people are often open to new ideas, and at times they then become the image makers who lead the way.