Why Film Photography is the Antithesis of AI Art
The camera is a reasonably recent image-creation tool; compared to millennia of paintings, drawings, carvings, and illustrations, we have only a few hundred years of photographs and photographic development. What photography offers compared to those ancient arts is (relative) immediacy and accuracy.
You can produce a hyper-realistic, hyper-accurate, photographic-seeming drawing, but it will take time. Or you can create a fast sketch, as a courtroom artist may produce, but this is unlikely to be hyper-realistic, usually more impressionistic.
The camera is the tool that can offer immediacy and accuracy in the depiction of whatever is in front of the lens. While digital paintings, hyper-realistic renderings via CGI, and even freehand pencil work can result in an image that represents reality as accurately as a camera, they can also offer something the camera cannot – imagery that exists beyond the scope of the lens, or even physical, current reality.
