Latest / The MOOD Podcast / What Koudelka's Photos Show Photographers About Finding Their Voice in the Age of AI - Moments of Mood, 3.5

Transcript

What Koudelka's Photos Show Photographers About Finding Their Voice in the Age of AI - Moments of Mood, 3.5 · The MOOD Podcast

• 0:00
  Matt Jacob: If you want to be a photographer for the rest of your life and actually be supported by it, you've probably asked yourself the same question I have.
• 0:09
  Matt Jacob: With AI images, tools, and creation expanding every single day, will that still be possible?
• 0:16
  Matt Jacob: Well, in this video, I want to show you how AI is actually going to make us more powerful storytellers, more valued for our craft, and what to double down on now so you're worth more to the industry in the future, not less.
• 0:30
  Matt Jacob: If you're an emerging photographer somewhere in the long middle of trying to find your own voice, I want to give you something today that is not just a tip or a technique or a preset.
• 0:43
  Matt Jacob: I want to give you a practice, a way of sitting with your own work that over the next 10 minutes or so might just loosen that quiet worry I think a lot of us are carrying right now.
• 0:55
  Matt Jacob: Now, in May this year, a company that makes photo editing software, Visco, put a single sentence in front of every photographer it could reach.
• 1:04
  Matt Jacob: Your eye, the way you see the world, cannot be generated.
• 1:08
  Matt Jacob: It cannot be prompted.
• 1:10
  Matt Jacob: It is irreplaceable.
• 1:11
  Matt Jacob: And it landed with me initially, naturally, like a bit of relief.
• 1:15
  Matt Jacob: I mean, the real impact of AI is obviously on a lot of our minds, not just as artists, but as humans throughout society, that fear of the uncertain.
• 1:23
  Matt Jacob: I'm sitting with one of my photographs today, and I made it in a place that is quietly disappearing.
• 1:29
  Matt Jacob: And I keep returning to it because it seems to know something about my voice that I think I keep forgetting.
• 1:37
  Matt Jacob: And as such, I am drawn back to this place time and time again.
• 1:41
  Matt Jacob: By the end of this episode, I want you to be holding a frame like it in your own mind, the one that is still unmistakably yours, even on the days your voice feels broken into a hundred pieces by everyone else's opinions or your thoughts.
• 1:56
  Matt Jacob: But to get there, we have to start with why that reassuring little sentence felt so good and what it quietly gives away.
• 2:04
  Matt Jacob: I'm not going to answer that yet, though.
• 2:14
  Matt Jacob: This is the Mood Podcast.
• 2:16
  Matt Jacob: I'm Matt Jacob, and this is the show that helps emerging photographers find their voice so that you can build a cohesive body of work, articulate what it's about, and get it in front of the right people.
• 2:29
  Matt Jacob: It's the only photography podcast that is itself a practice.
• 2:33
  Matt Jacob: Every week I sit down with a guest or break down a single idea in a commentary just like this one called Moments of Mood.
• 2:41
  Matt Jacob: Either way, we just slow down and turn one idea over in the hand until it shows us something about how we see and who we are becoming as artists.
• 2:51
  Matt Jacob: Two questions sit underneath everything I'm going to say today.
• 2:55
  Matt Jacob: The first, why did we need a company to tell us that our own eye was actually worth something?
• 3:01
  Matt Jacob: And the second, and the one that I guess gives me a little bit more comfort, what if your eye was never yours to begin with?
• 3:07
  Matt Jacob: And what if that turns out to be the best news you have heard all year?
• 3:12
  Matt Jacob: I'll explain.
• 3:13
  Matt Jacob: But before we go any further, sit still with me for half a minute.
• 3:17
  Matt Jacob: Wherever you are, bring to mind one image you have made.
• 3:21
  Matt Jacob: Not your most liked, not your best performing, the one you would still have made if you knew no one would ever see it.
• 3:29
  Matt Jacob: Picture it now and notice that you do not have to defend it to anyone here.
• 3:34
  Matt Jacob: There is no number underneath it in this room.
• 3:37
  Matt Jacob: There is only you and the thing you saw and the fact that you were the one who saw it.
• 3:42
  Matt Jacob: Hold it there because we're going to come back to it.
• 3:46
  Matt Jacob: Now, let me name the worry because it is real and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
• 3:52
  Matt Jacob: Images can now be conjured out of nothing.
• 3:55
  Matt Jacob: We've all seen it.
• 3:56
  Matt Jacob: Infinite, instant, costless almost.
• 3:59
  Matt Jacob: Brands that used to hire photographers are generating what they need instead.
• 4:04
  Matt Jacob: The platforms we built our names on bury our best work beneath whatever is trending that morning or afternoon.
• 4:11
  Matt Jacob: And somewhere in the back of the room, there is always a voice.
• 4:15
  Matt Jacob: Sometimes other people's, of course, sometimes our own, asking whether any of this is still worth doing.
• 4:23
  Matt Jacob: So I look back at this one photograph I made from a place I won't name because it's precious to me and a world I want to keep as fiction, actually.
• 4:31
  Matt Jacob: And I admit the machine could approximate it now.
• 4:35
  Matt Jacob: It could render the light, the dust, the composition, the texture.
• 4:38
  Matt Jacob: What it could not do though is be there.
• 4:40
  Matt Jacob: I was the one standing in that heat, invited to that moment, carrying whatever I carried into it.
• 4:46
  Matt Jacob: All of my thoughts, fears, worries, hopes, and desires.
• 4:50
  Matt Jacob: My physical exhaustion, the games in my head, the external pressures of time, people, light and environment, and of course, so much more.
• 4:59
  Matt Jacob: And here is the part I kept turning over.
• 5:02
  Matt Jacob: The same company that told us our I cannot be generated also builds the tools that generate.
• 5:08
  Matt Jacob: It runs a whole lab of artificial intelligence.
• 5:11
  Matt Jacob: Its own research found that an overwhelming number of photographers already use these tools every single day.
• 5:18
  Matt Jacob: And woven throughout the very pages of that reassuring campaign are invitations to subscribe.
• 5:25
  Matt Jacob: Now, I'm not saying this to attack them or to demonstrate a paradox because I use that app and I love it.
• 5:30
  Matt Jacob: But I think the sentiment is probably sincere.
• 5:32
  Matt Jacob: And I'm saying that because it reveals something.
• 5:35
  Matt Jacob: The reassurance is also a transaction.
• 5:38
  Matt Jacob: The comfort is also a product.
• 5:40
  Matt Jacob: And if comfort about your own worth has become something that can be sold back to you, we have to ask who first convinced you that you needed to buy it.
• 5:52
  Matt Jacob: So here is what I have come to believe.
• 5:55
  Matt Jacob: The crisis is not artificial intelligence.
• 5:58
  Matt Jacob: The crisis is that the sentence your eye cannot be replaced felt like rescue.
• 6:03
  Matt Jacob: And rescue is only sweet to someone who's already drowning.
• 6:07
  Matt Jacob: We were drowning long before machines arrived.
• 6:10
  Matt Jacob: We had slowly handed the verdict on our own work to everything outside ourselves.
• 6:16
  Matt Jacob: The likes, the algorithms, the client's nod, the small gray number underneath the picture.
• 6:22
  Matt Jacob: If you are an emerging photographer and your voice feels fragmented, like it changes shape depending on who is looking, this is the reason.
• 6:32
  Matt Jacob: You are carrying a dozen judges in your head, if not more, and not one of them is you.
• 6:37
  Matt Jacob: Artificial intelligence is simply the newest judge whose approval we are terrified of losing.
• 6:43
  Matt Jacob: Now, when I look at this frame, the reason it still feels unmistakably mine is almost embarrassingly simple.
• 6:50
  Matt Jacob: I made it for no verdict but my own.
• 6:56
  Matt Jacob: In August of 1968, Soviet tanks rolled into Prague.
• 7:00
  Matt Jacob: Kadelka was 30.
• 7:02
  Matt Jacob: He was not a news photographer, he had never photographed anything you could call an event.
• 7:07
  Matt Jacob: He photographed theater and the Roma communities of his own country quietly, for no one but himself.
• 7:14
  Matt Jacob: And then the tanks came into his city, and something in him simply had to lift the camera.
• 7:20
  Matt Jacob: His exact words, it was my country.
• 7:23
  Matt Jacob: I took these photographs for myself, not for a magazine.
• 7:27
  Matt Jacob: It was only by chance that they were actually published.
• 7:30
  Matt Jacob: I knew it was important to photograph, so I photographed.
• 7:34
  Matt Jacob: Wonderful.
• 7:36
  Matt Jacob: Now, those negatives were smuggled out under the name of an unknown Czech photographer, because if he had been identified, he could have been imprisoned or worse, right?
• 7:48
  Matt Jacob: Now he won one of the most prestigious awards in the medium and could not tell a soul the pictures were his.
• 7:55
  Matt Jacob: For 16 years, he carried that silence.
• 7:58
  Matt Jacob: And it did not diminish the work by a single degree, because the worth of those photographs was never out there.
• 8:05
  Matt Jacob: It lived in him.
• 8:06
  Matt Jacob: And that is what I'm after in this one frame.
• 8:09
  Matt Jacob: Not to be Kadelka, of course, but to remember that the seeing was the thing, not the applause.
• 8:15
  Matt Jacob: A machine can render the smoke and the crowd or whatever it is, but what it cannot be is the witness.
• 8:21
  Matt Jacob: And I want to say one thing right here in the middle and then just get it out of the way.
• 8:26
  Matt Jacob: Relearning to trust your own eye is almost impossible to do alone because everything around you is built to keep you looking outward for the verdict.
• 8:36
  Matt Jacob: That is the thing that fragments a voice in the first place.
• 8:39
  Matt Jacob: So I made a room where the scoreboard is switched off and it's called Mood Insiders.
• 8:44
  Matt Jacob: It's a community, and people there ask what you saw, not how you performed.
• 8:49
  Matt Jacob: If your voice feels scattered, this is the room where it slowly gathers back into one.
• 8:54
  Matt Jacob: That's all I'll say about it.
• 8:56
  Matt Jacob: Now, I'm not going to pretend the fear underneath all of this stuff evaporates just because a Czech man was brave in 1968.
• 9:05
  Matt Jacob: So let me say it out loud, the real one, the one at two in the morning.
• 9:09
  Matt Jacob: What if my eye is ordinary?
• 9:11
  Matt Jacob: What if I am not bearing witness to anything and I'm just photographing the same coastline or whatever it is as everyone else?
• 9:19
  Matt Jacob: What if the machine really is good enough now and the world quietly stops needing what I make and my voice never gathers into anything whole?
• 9:28
  Matt Jacob: I've sat in that myself more than once.
• 9:31
  Matt Jacob: Now let me be here for a moment, because the comfort I'm about to offer is worthless if I rush you out of the fear before you have felt it.
• 9:39
  Matt Jacob: Here is the first thing I have come to believe, and it begins as something almost embarrassingly practical.
• 9:45
  Matt Jacob: Real photography is about to become more valuable, not less.
• 9:50
  Matt Jacob: When something becomes infinite, it becomes cheap.
• 9:54
  Matt Jacob: We are about to be buried under even bigger avalanche of images that cost nothing, that no one lived, that no one stood in the heat for, that no one returned to a disappearing place three times or four or five to make.
• 10:06
  Matt Jacob: And against that flood, a frame like this one or yours, with actual experience inside it becomes rare.
• 10:13
  Matt Jacob: People feel the difference even when they cannot name it, and they reach for the real thing because the human heart has always hungered for what is true.
• 10:21
  Matt Jacob: The work that costs a person something is becoming scarce.
• 10:26
  Matt Jacob: And scarcity in the end is value.
• 10:29
  Matt Jacob: But I think there's something larger moving underneath the economics, and it is the part I find genuinely helpful.
• 10:36
  Matt Jacob: There's a phrase going around now coined by a man named Stephen Johnson and used by writers like Sam Harris.
• 10:42
  Matt Jacob: It's the revenge of the humanities.
• 10:44
  Matt Jacob: For a generation, we were all told that the safe future belonged to the technical, the coded, the automatable, and that the artists and the writers and the people who study the human soul were indulging something quaint.
• 10:58
  Matt Jacob: And now the machine has arrived and quietly swallowed exactly the work we were told was safe.
• 11:04
  Matt Jacob: What it cannot swallow is the rest, the taste, the judgment, the lived understanding of why a thing matters.
• 11:11
  Matt Jacob: The voice that arrives at a conclusion that is genuinely its own rather than the most plausible or predictable average of everything anyone else has already said.
• 11:22
  Matt Jacob: Even the people building these systems are saying it out loud.
• 11:26
  Matt Jacob: Daniela Amade, who co-founded one of the largest AI companies in the world, Anthropic, studied literature, and she has said the things that make us human will become much more important.
• 11:38
  Matt Jacob: That studying the humanities now matters more than ever.
• 11:42
  Matt Jacob: Sit with how strange and how reassuring that is.
• 11:45
  Matt Jacob: For decades, the market treated your sensibility, your eye, your years of quiet looking as a soft and unserious thing.
• 11:53
  Matt Jacob: The machine is about to make it the most valuable thing you own.
• 11:57
  Matt Jacob: Not because you can outproduce it, of course you can't, but because you can do the one thing it will never do.
• 12:04
  Matt Jacob: You can mean it.
• 12:06
  Matt Jacob: This is why I am not afraid for this photograph.
• 12:09
  Matt Jacob: A thousand synthetic versions of this place could exist by tonight, and not one of them will have been there.
• 12:16
  Matt Jacob: Not one will carry a single hour that was actually lived.
• 12:20
  Matt Jacob: And in a world drowning in images that no one lived, the one that was lived becomes the only one worth looking at twice.
• 12:28
  Matt Jacob: So here it is what I want to say to you plainly, as the emerging photographer I am actually talking to.
• 12:35
  Matt Jacob: Go deeper, not louder.
• 12:37
  Matt Jacob: Deeper.
• 12:38
  Matt Jacob: Find the voice that is yours and follow it past the point where it is comfortable.
• 12:42
  Matt Jacob: Because in amongst the noise, in amongst the endless AI slop scrolling past every thumb on earth, the one thing people are starving for and will be more so is a human being that saw something and meant it.
• 12:56
  Matt Jacob: We want to hear your voice.
• 12:57
  Matt Jacob: We are going to need it more than we ever have.
• 13:00
  Matt Jacob: Do not go quiet at the exact moment the world is finally desperate for the real.
• 13:06
  Matt Jacob: But the practical comfort is not the one that I think is actually liberating.
• 13:11
  Matt Jacob: Kodelka, late in his life after the tanks and the exile, said something that has not left me.
• 13:18
  Matt Jacob: One world is disappearing.
• 13:19
  Matt Jacob: I'm trying to photograph what is left.
• 13:22
  Matt Jacob: I've always been drawn to what is ending, to what will soon no longer exist.
• 13:27
  Matt Jacob: I do not go there to prove I am irreplaceable.
• 13:31
  Matt Jacob: I gave that up.
• 13:32
  Matt Jacob: I go because the seeing moves through me when I am there, the way it moves through anyone who slows down enough to look.
• 13:40
  Matt Jacob: And that is the thing I want to hand to you.
• 13:42
  Matt Jacob: Your eye was never a possession.
• 13:44
  Matt Jacob: It was never something you could own or lose or have stolen by a machine.
• 13:50
  Matt Jacob: It moves through you whenever you stop and pay attention.
• 13:54
  Matt Jacob: You cannot lose what you never owned, which means you can finally stop gripping it, stop proving it, stop measuring whether your work is original enough or seen enough to justify the years you have given to it.
• 14:08
  Matt Jacob: Those were never the industry's rules.
• 14:11
  Matt Jacob: They were the ones we wrote for ourselves, and we are allowed to put them down.
• 14:16
  Matt Jacob: Let me gather this into three things that we can carry out.
• 14:20
  Matt Jacob: Number one, the concern, and in some places, worry or even panic was never really about the machines.
• 14:26
  Matt Jacob: It was about how much of your own worth you had already handed away long before they arrived.
• 14:33
  Matt Jacob: Number two, the work that costs a human being something is becoming rare, and rare things gain value.
• 14:39
  Matt Jacob: You do not have to win that argument because the market makes it for you.
• 14:44
  Matt Jacob: Number three, and this is the one I want you to really try and remember: your eye was never a possession.
• 14:49
  Matt Jacob: It was never yours to own or to lose.
• 14:52
  Matt Jacob: It moved through you whenever you slow down and look hard enough.
• 14:55
  Matt Jacob: So you can stop defending the imperfect frame.
• 14:58
  Matt Jacob: It is okay that the work is not perfect.
• 15:01
  Matt Jacob: It just is.
• 15:02
  Matt Jacob: And that is the freedom.
• 15:04
  Matt Jacob: Here is the reflection I'm leaving in your hands, the one that I will probably be sitting with myself as I move forward and get on with my life.
• 15:11
  Matt Jacob: Go and find the single photograph that is unmistakably yours.
• 15:15
  Matt Jacob: Not your best, yours.
• 15:17
  Matt Jacob: The one you would still have made if the internet had never existed.
• 15:20
  Matt Jacob: Look at it without defending it to anyone and ask what it already knows about your voice that you have been too scattered or too busy or too afraid of the verdict to hear.
• 15:31
  Matt Jacob: That frame is not fragmented.
• 15:33
  Matt Jacob: You are not fragmented.
• 15:34
  Matt Jacob: You only forgot which judge to listen to, and it was always the one looking through your lens.
• 15:40
  Matt Jacob: It is okay that your eye was never yours.
• 15:44
  Matt Jacob: That was never the loss.
• 15:45
  Matt Jacob: That was always the freedom.
• 15:47
  Matt Jacob: And it was never theirs to take.
• 15:49
  Matt Jacob: So now we can see how AI is going to make you a more powerful storyteller and more valuable as a photographer.
• 15:57
  Matt Jacob: But how do you actually develop your self-awareness so you can capture those truly human moments before they pass?
• 16:05
  Matt Jacob: Well, check this video out where we go into the hidden psychology behind your photography.
• 16:11
  Matt Jacob: And I'll see you in the next one.
• 16:12
  Matt Jacob: Happy shooting.