ai statement

Last updated August 2026

I figured I should probably address the AI thing, because it's become increasingly difficult to use any professional editing software without running into it.

I have to use it, albeit with extreme prejudice and under protest. Not because I've suddenly decided that having a computer make creative decisions for me is a great idea, but because AI has been forcefully shoved into basically every piece of software photographers use, and at this point there isn't really an option to opt out if you want to keep using the tools available to you.

There is, however, a pretty big difference between using an AI-powered feature in Photoshop to help me mask something and asking AI to make me a photograph.

I don't do the latter.

I don't use AI to generate people, locations, backgrounds, entire images, or anything else that didn't actually exist in front of my camera. I'm a photographer. The whole point, for me, is that I was actually there. I saw something, I made a decision about how to photograph it, and I took the picture.

I'll use the tools that are built into my editing software to make the process of editing that photograph easier, but that's about as far as I'm willing to go.

I'm not particularly interested in watching human-made art become something we consider interchangeable with whatever a computer can spit out in three seconds (base on a dataset of images it stole from actual photographers without consent or compensation). Art is one of the few things we make that is entirely about being human: our experiences, our tastes, our perspectives, our mistakes, our weirdness…all of it. That's what makes being a human interesting. That’s what makes capturing being a human interesting.

So yes, AI exists in my workflow, though I wish it didn't need to.

But the photographs are still mine: the people in them are real, the places are real, these moments happened IRL. And I'm not going to, and will never, generatively manufacture something completely artificial and try pass it off as a ‘photograph’ just because I can.

That distinction matters to me, and hopefully it matters to the people who hire me, too: it’s important that photographers and clients are aligned in their values and their expectations are managed in a way that makes sense to them both in a world that increasingly does not.