Art, AI and Photography: Confessions of a Photographer in the Midst of Mutation

Is AI still art? A mutation of photography

Logbook: when the word becomes matter and the pixel becomes pigment.

I am often asked, somewhere between sincere curiosity and evident worry: ‘Is AI still art?’

I could summon treatises on aesthetics, hold forth for hours on Walter Benjamin or dissect lines of algorithms. I prefer to open my studio to you. To tell you about my screen in the half-light, my sleepless nights, and the very concrete vertigo that grips me at the chasm between ten hours of manual sweat and a few seconds of digital generation.

The craftsman and the material: the end of sterile constraint

To understand my approach, you have to understand where I come from. I approach art photography the way a sculptor approaches a block of marble: I look for volume, density, the roughness of skin, the way shadow hollows out a curve. My anchor remains viscerally human. The model is never a pretext, but a living presence, a gaze, flesh that carries a dramatic tension.

For years, the fight played out over the set. How many hours did I spend combing through image banks looking for a ruined palace, a cracked gold leaf or a particular chiaroscuro? I found only sanitised, lukewarm compromises, unable to sustain the baroque, dreamlike vision I had in mind.

The arrival of Artificial Intelligence did not replace the gesture; it freed the sculptor from the shortage of props. It became my production designer, capable of building invisible architectures around the raw power of my models.

Here, synergy takes hold: the tactile truth of the model is anchored in a bespoke generated digital universe. The art of the nude gains an infinite space of expression, where the body converses with myth.

The vertigo of the instant: the case of ‘Avarice’

But the ground gave way beneath our feet. The tool no longer evolves in steps: it explodes.

To explore the concept of Avarice, I recently typed a single line of text — a raw intention. In a few seconds, the image materialised.

The shock was not only visual, it was technical. The patina of the metal, the tension of the chains, the way the light caught the skin: it was all there. With spotlights, make-up, forged props and hours of post-processing, it would have taken me three days in the studio to reach this degree of textural precision. The machine delivered it in a breath.

The question then arises, inevitably: when physical effort disappears, what remains of the artistic act?

From aperture to word: translating the gesture

I don’t believe in the death of creation, but in its metamorphosis. We are witnessing a shift from pure optical technique towards a form of literary architecture.

An algorithm without intention remains an empty shell. To draw a masterly image from an AI, it is not enough to click: you have to know how to name. The word becomes the chisel. Mastery is no longer measured only by aperture settings or Photoshop layer masks, but by visual culture, by an intimate knowledge of Flemish light, by an understanding of anatomy and by the poetic precision of the word. Without artistic culture, AI produces only the conventional and the smooth. To breathe a soul into it, you must be a creator of meaning before being a camera operator.

The recurring quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns

This trial of illegitimacy is nothing new. In 1859, Baudelaire was already calling photography ‘art’s most mortal enemy’. Later, the arrival of digital had people crying that film was dead, then Photoshop was accused of distorting the truth of the darkroom.

With every technological rupture, the boundary shifts. AI is only the latest storm: it sweeps away the technical drudgery to leave only the skeleton of art — pure vision.

One non-negotiable ethical imperative remains: the recognition and payment of the artists whose works fed the training models. Once this framework is set and respected, the field of possibilities becomes dizzying.

Whether I spend ten hours directing light in the studio or ten hours searching for the exact formula to bring a world into being, the quest remains unchanged: to externalise an inner vision in order to stir something within. My keyboard has joined my camera bodies. Art does not go out, it moults. And this new skin has the fascinating texture of the unknown. AI: a true mutation of photography.

See you soon for more articles!

Yohann