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# Photography Is Not Dead. It Just Needs to Stop Looking at Itself
- URL: https://abagofstories.com/photography-is-not-dead-it-just-needs-to-stop-looking-at-itself/
- Published: 2026-08-16T19:27:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-18T17:07:16.000Z
- Description: We have never made so many images, and perhaps we have never spent so much time asking photography to prove its own importance. There may be another way: move the photographer away from the center, and ask what an image can actually do in the life of someone else.
- Author: Claudio Maria Lerario
- Tags: Field Notes, The Ethics of Looking, Local Futures

It has become almost conventional to announce the death of photography. **There are good reasons for doing so.** Newspapers sell fewer copies. Magazines commission less work. Social media has compressed images into fractions of seconds. Everyone carries a camera in their phone. 

Artificial intelligence can now produce convincing photographs of people who never existed, places that were never visited, wars that were never fought and light that never fell.

The old professional ecosystem has undeniably changed. **Some parts of it may never return.** We do not feel particularly nostalgic about this.

Photography has survived glass plates, roll film, color, television, digital cameras, smartphones, Photoshop and every previous prediction of its disappearance. It will probably survive artificial intelligence too.

What interests us more is something else that may be dying with the old system: an idea of photography that placed the photographer permanently at its center. **Perhaps we should allow that part to die.**

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/08/luc-lab-1.jpg)

From ***Ubuntu**, an Ayzoh! community photography project in Ethiopia, in which children built cardboard pinhole cameras and photographed what they considered important or dear to them.

## The photographer in the middle of the picture

There is a strange amount of photography that is ultimately about photographers. The exhibition, the prize, the portfolio review, the festival, the jury, the statement, the biography, the recognition; then another competition, another submission, another opportunity to be selected by someone whose own authority depends partly upon selecting others.

**None of these things is inherently wrong.** There are excellent festivals. Serious editors. Necessary exhibitions. Awards that have supported important work and helped photographers continue producing it.

The problem begins when validation becomes the purpose of the work itself. A young photographer can very easily come to believe that the central question of photography is: **Will somebody notice me?** Then the machinery begins.

We learn how to construct the portfolio. How to explain the project. How to develop a recognizable visual language. How to present ourselves. **How to be different from other photographers.** How to acquire the vocabulary that surrounds photography and sometimes seems designed to make an ordinary human gesture sound like a philosophical event.

Meanwhile, somewhere inside all this, there is still a person being photographed. **We are interested in that person.** This apparently simple displacement changes almost everything.

At [Ayzoh!](https://ayzoh.org/?ref=abagofstories.com), we stopped participating in photography competitions long ago. It was not a moral judgment on photographers who enter them; it was simply increasingly difficult for us to understand what we were asking a jury to evaluate.

A child living on the street? An Indigenous family defending its territory? A worker? An old woman sitting in her kitchen? A ceremony someone had allowed us to witness? **Which one deserved the gold medal?** The question eventually became absurd to us.

The photographs belonged to projects whose meaning existed elsewhere: in relationships, memory, publications, local struggles, exhibitions built with communities, educational work, sometimes in very concrete things that happened afterward.

Ayzoh!'s photography has contributed, **together with other people and organizations**, to projects that helped build schools, libraries, shelters and wells. Photographs have accompanied Indigenous struggles and collective memories. They have moved through books, walls, classrooms and homes.

Some of those results were publicized. Many were not. **That is not modesty.** It is simply that the applause was never the point.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/08/luc-lab-2.jpg)

From ***Ubuntu**, an Ayzoh! community photography project in Ethiopia, in which children built cardboard pinhole cameras and photographed what they considered important or dear to them.

## There is no “real photography”

Another small war that has never interested us is the war over what constitutes "true photography". Film against digital. Leica against Canon. Nikon against Sony. Fujifilm against everyone else. Prime lenses against zooms. The purity of the optical viewfinder. The discipline supposedly lost when thirty-six exposures became thirty-six hundred.

**We use almost everything:** Canon, Leica, Fujifilm, Nikon, Sony, iPhone. The camera matters enormously when you are selecting the right tool for the work; afterward, ideally, it should disappear.

> Some of the photographs that have mattered most in our projects were made during ***Ubuntu***. We asked the children a simple question: photograph something that is important or dear to you. They built cardboard pinhole cameras and began deciding what deserved their attention. No autofocus, no sensor, no brand to defend; only a small hole, light, time, and a reason to look.

Modern professional cameras are extraordinarily capable. Arguments about brands can be enjoyable in the same way that arguments about cars, watches or guitars can be enjoyable, but equipment should not be confused with a worldview.

Nor do we believe that shooting film automatically makes someone more thoughtful. **There were terrible photographs made on film.** And there are extraordinary photographs made with phones.

The discipline does not live inside the camera. It lives in the photographer's relationship with time, knowledge, proximity, doubt and responsibility.

We continue studying the photographers who preceded us. [**Sebastião Salgado**](https://abagofstories.com/the-beauty-and-the-distance/) has been an important reference in our photographic formation; so has [**Graciela Iturbide**](https://abagofstories.com/learning-to-be-surprised/), among others. We return to great photographs because they teach us how other people solved problems of distance, composition, light, presence, narrative and respect.

But studying a master is different from building a religion around photography. Traditions are useful when they give us something to stand on. They become dangerous when they tell us where we are allowed to walk.

[Learning to Be SurprisedWalking through fifty years of Graciela Iturbide’s photographs in Uruapan, I found myself thinking less about photographic style than about something harder to preserve: the ability to encounter the world without already knowing what the picture should be.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/icon/Logo-A-bag-of-stories-favicon-6b607653-9709-47ce-82c4-2edba72fd2e1.png)A Bag of Stories / A Cultural Platform by Afar and Ayzoh!Claudio Maria Lerario![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/thumbnail/graciela-b-0001-bffe40c0-bd7e-4a65-9db3-6458c8f2ceb4.jpg)](https://abagofstories.com/learning-to-be-surprised/)

[The Beauty and the DistanceWalking through Sebastião Salgado’s Amazônia, I entered as an admirer. I left still moved by its beauty, but carrying a harder question: when photography makes us care through wonder, what might that same beauty leave outside the frame?![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/icon/Logo-A-bag-of-stories-favicon-1af17da4-ce3b-45df-83d3-cf1bc05394ea.png)A Bag of Stories / A Cultural Platform by Afar and Ayzoh!Giulia Zhang![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/thumbnail/salgado-0001-bdeaa232-516a-40bf-af0d-559bf8d5ec34.jpg)](https://abagofstories.com/the-beauty-and-the-distance/)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/08/luc-ubuntu-3.jpg)

From ***Ubuntu**, an Ayzoh! community photography project in Ethiopia, in which children built cardboard pinhole cameras and photographed what they considered important or dear to them.

## The algorithm is not the enemy

Artificial intelligence has added another anxiety. If an algorithm can make beautiful photographs, perhaps photographers should deliberately make ugly ones. If machines produce technical perfection, human beings should seek imperfection; blur the image, break the composition, expose incorrectly, leave fingerprints on the glass.

We do not find this particularly convincing; because the algorithm would still be deciding what we do. We would merely be walking in the opposite direction. And artificial intelligence will learn ugliness anyway. **It already can.**

It can produce grain, mistakes, dust, bad framing, faded film, accidental flash, cheap lenses, damaged negatives and almost every other visual sign we once associated with human imperfection. **Trying to defeat AI aesthetically seems to us a very small ambition for photography**.

The more interesting question is what happens if we stop asking the image alone to carry all the value. An algorithm can generate a convincing photograph of a well. **It cannot** have spent years in a relationship with the people who decided they needed one.

It can generate a photograph of a classroom: **it cannot** know the children who will use it. It can invent a face with extraordinary precision. It has no responsibility toward that person tomorrow morning, because that person does not exist.

The value of documentary photography has never resided exclusively in pixels, grain, composition or beauty. Part of its value exists outside the frame. It exists in what happened before the photograph and what happens afterward.

**Who let you enter.** Why. What you understood. What you misunderstood. Whether the person photographed ever saw the picture. Whether she recognized herself in the story you told. Whether you returned. Whether the relationship survived publication. Whether anything useful remained when the photographer left.

AI therefore does not frighten us nearly as much as another possibility: that photographers themselves might forget this.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/08/luc-ubuntu-8.jpg)

From ***Ubuntu**, an Ayzoh! community photography project in Ethiopia, in which children built cardboard pinhole cameras and photographed what they considered important or dear to them.

## The danger of beautiful intentions

Photography has always attracted noble language. We photograph to reveal "hidden worlds". To tell the stories of the "forgotten". To give voice to the "voiceless". To show "humanity". To create "awareness".

We have used some of these expressions ourselves in the past. Today we distrust several of them. **People are rarely voiceless.** Usually they have voices and someone else controls the microphone. That distinction is not semantic: it completely changes the photographer's position.

If we imagine that we give people a voice, **we place ourselves above them**; we become the benevolent intermediary through whom their existence becomes visible.

If instead we understand that people already possess knowledge, language, history, conflict, humor, contradictions and political agency, **the photographer becomes something much less heroic and much more useful**.

A participant or a witness. Sometimes a technician. Sometimes the person who happens to have access to publishing tools. Sometimes simply someone who listens.

There is another phrase we hear frequently: *photographing humanity*. Strangely, “humanity” in photography often appears to live very far from Europe and North America.

It wears traditional clothing. It belongs to an Indigenous people. It works with its hands. It has a weathered face. It lives somewhere a photographer needed several flights to reach.

We have spent much of our lives working in such places, and some of the relationships formed there are among the most important we have.

**But humanity is also in Rimini.** It is on a bus in Oslo. It is inside a kitchen, a factory, a hospital waiting room, a suburban street. It is a husband teasing his wife. It is two people helping one another carry something heavy.

It is a family photograph that matters to five people and will never enter a museum. If photography needs exoticism in order to find humanity, the problem is not with humanity.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/08/luc-lab-4.jpg)

From ***Ubuntu**, an Ayzoh! community photography project in Ethiopia, in which children built cardboard pinhole cameras and photographed what they considered important or dear to them.

## Who owns the story?

At Ayzoh!, many projects involve professional photographers working alongside children, adolescents and adults from the communities themselves.

> The photographs made during ***Ubuntu*** eventually became a collective book and later traveled onto T-shirts. What interested us was not turning children into photographers. It was seeing what happened when photography stopped asking them to be subjects and gave them the possibility of deciding where the camera should point.

Some participants know cameras well. Others do not. We teach technique when technique is useful. **We learn from people when their knowledge is what matters**.

The resulting photographic work is often credited collectively. Whenever possible, the names of everyone involved are acknowledged; however, individual photographs are not necessarily separated into hierarchies of authorship.

A photograph made by an established professional and one made by a child can live inside the same narrative. For the traditional photographic system this can seem strange. Who took the best picture? Whose photograph is this? Who gets the credit? For us the more useful question can be: **What are these photographs saying together?**

Collective authorship is not appropriate for every kind of photography, nor do we propose it as a universal rule. Copyright, professional recognition and individual authorship matter.

But working this way has taught us something valuable: the cult of the individual author is only one possible way to organize images.

A community can also build a visual memory of itself. A family does this naturally. Nobody opens an old family album demanding to know who deserves the award for the photograph on page seventeen...

**The photograph matters because someone is there.** Someone remembers. Someone does not. Someone has died. Someone has grown old. Someone points to a face and begins telling a story. In that moment photography is doing its work perfectly.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/08/luc-lab-5.jpg)

From ***Ubuntu**, an Ayzoh! community photography project in Ethiopia, in which children built cardboard pinhole cameras and photographed what they considered important or dear to them.

## When a photograph leaves the photographer

We have come to believe that a photograph is incomplete if its life ends with publication. **This is one reason returning photographs matters so much to us.**

A photographer arrives, takes something intangible but important — an image, a gesture, a moment in someone's life — and carries it away. Often the photograph then enters an entirely different economy: it may be published, exhibited, archived, discussed, sold, awarded or used to build the photographer's reputation.

The person in the photograph may never see it. This asymmetry has become so normal that photography barely notices it. **We do:** returning an image does not magically resolve the unequal relationships that can exist between photographer and photographed. It does not substitute for consent, context or responsibility.

But sometimes [**a small printed photograph**](https://abagofstories.com/give-the-photo-back/) placed in someone's hand changes the nature of the exchange.

The image returns to the world from which it came. It may enter a wallet, a drawer, a wall, a family album. Its meaning changes. And suddenly the photograph has a life the photographer no longer controls. **Good**.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/08/luc-ubuntu-10.jpg)

From ***Ubuntu**, an Ayzoh! community photography project in Ethiopia, in which children built cardboard pinhole cameras and photographed what they considered important or dear to them.

## What should a young photographer do?

We are often asked what someone should do if they want to become a photographer. The professional answer would probably involve portfolio development, networking, personal projects, assisting, grants, competitions, social media presence and finding a visual identity.

Some of this advice is useful. But we would begin elsewhere: forget, for a while, about becoming a photographer. **Find something you care about:** a neighborhood, a family, a parish, a group of friends, a small association, a local archive, a disappearing craft, a community defending something, a memory that nobody has organized, a place whose history is being forgotten,

Then ask what photography could usefully do there. Not what photographs you could take from it. What photography could do **with it**. After that, become technically serious.

**Study** light. Study editing. Study history. Learn how files survive twenty years. Learn captions. Understand color. Learn when a wide-angle lens lies. Learn when a beautiful photograph simplifies something that was complicated. Learn enough technique that technical weakness does not become an alibi for intellectual laziness.

Study the masters, argue with them, make mistakes, **make better mistakes.** But do not allow applause to become your compass.

A critic may dislike the work. A jury may reject it. An editor may never answer your email. Instagram may show the photograph to forty-three people. None of these events tells you whether the photograph mattered.

**Ask instead:** Did it matter to the people involved? Did it preserve something? Did it clarify something? Did it create a conversation? Did it become useful? Did someone keep it? Did someone recognize their own history inside it?

Sometimes the answer will be no. **That is fine too.** Not every photograph needs to change the world. This is another burden photography should be allowed to put down. A photograph may simply preserve the face of a person someone loved. **That is already enough.**

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/08/luc-ubuntu-19.jpg)

From ***Ubuntu**, an Ayzoh! community photography project in Ethiopia, in which children built cardboard pinhole cameras and photographed what they considered important or dear to them.

## Why photography is at the center of *A Bag of Stories*

This is the understanding of photography we bring into *A Bag of Stories*. Photographs here are not decorations placed between paragraphs to prevent the reader from becoming bored.

Nor are they evidence that our writers have visited interesting places. **We want images to think alongside the text**. Sometimes they contradict it. Sometimes they notice what the writer missed. Sometimes the photograph carries memory while the words carry context. Sometimes an entire story begins because of something visible in a frame that nobody understood at first.

> This is also why we created [***The Ethics of Looking***](https://abagofstories.com/tag/the-ethics-of-looking/): because looking is never entirely innocent, particularly when a camera enters the relationship.

But ethics for us cannot become another vocabulary used to demonstrate the photographer's virtue. The point is not to become the ethically perfect photographer. **There is no such person.**

The point is to remain responsible enough **to doubt** our own position, to listen when someone disagrees with our interpretation, to understand that permission and consent are not always the same thing, and occasionally to accept that the right photograph is the one we decide not to take.

**Photography remains extraordinarily alive to us.** Not because cameras are improving. Not because prints still look beautiful on museum walls. Not because the next technological revolution will save the profession.

It is alive because people still need memory. Because communities still need archives. Because injustice still benefits from invisibility. Because families still need photographs.

Because someone, somewhere, will still hold an image twenty years from now and **remember** something that would otherwise have disappeared.

Perhaps professional photography as we knew it is dying. Perhaps the old gatekeepers are losing their power. Perhaps artificial intelligence will take over entire categories of image production. **So be it.**

Photography has a larger life available to it. But to find that life, photographers may have to stop staring at photography for a while. **Stop asking who is watching us.**

Stop worrying about whether the picture is sufficiently new, sufficiently original, sufficiently fashionable, sufficiently wrong or sufficiently perfect. Turn the camera around. There is someone there. **Begin with them.**