BARRY SUTTON: "THE ONLY LIMITATION IS THE IMAGINATION"

Barry Sutton: I’ve been making very realistic drawings since I was two years old—mostly portraits—so I have always been very interested in people’s facial features and what makes each of us unique. My mom kept all of these drawings, bless her heart. I still have them.

BS: I discovered photography in college, actually. I was studying graphic design, and my friends and I used to go thrift store shopping on the weekends—mostly for cool clothes. One day, I found a Polaroid camera and started experimenting with black-and-white film. I had studied and was drawn to the work of early twentieth-century photographers like Edward Weston, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and Walker Evans, so I had references for what I was interested in making pictures of. I was enchanted by the immediacy and accuracy of the results. I shot Polaroids all summer that year and never looked back. The camera has always been a passport to my life’s journey.

BS: I’ve known about AI conceptually for decades, but I didn’t really start experimenting with it until late 2022. Like my discovery of the Polaroid camera in 1981, it immediately accessed a part of my brain that easily embraces the idea of infinite possibilities. Once you make that connection with a piece of technology, there is no turning back.

BS: The most challenging thing is actually the amount of time I spend in front of a screen. For me, this is a dangerous riddle to solve. With a camera, I am moving, looking, observing, and breathing. Now, I can spend innumerable hours at the computer, barely moving, breathing shallowly, and not eating! It’s a practice that requires an insane amount of self-awareness to balance intense focus with a lack of motion. On the technical side, working with new tools is incredibly exciting and feels like training a wild horse.

BS: I have always worked with a few rules: the best camera is the one you have with you, always have a plan, and always remain open to the possibility of something unexpected. In this way, I have been able to use AI tools with intent while also working with the inherent strengths and limitations of these tools to create an authentic expression. The exciting prospect here is that anything is possible. AI has effectively shortened the distance between idea and execution, so the only limitation is imagination.

BS: As an artist with access to a vast toolbox, I often ask myself questions like: What kind of camera will I use? What types of lenses? Is it black and white or color? THE KIDZ ARE ALRIGHT is a story about youth culture and the pain and joys of coming of age. It’s a subject I’ve focused on in my photography for years. However, with a camera and a short-form project, you can only capture so much—usually just a small piece of a larger story.

With KIDZ, I wanted to tell the big story, which has so many scenes that it would take months or years to shoot. One thing AI enables artists to do is dramatically shorten the time from idea to execution. In a matter of weeks, I was able to construct a sort of movie—all the scenes from the school bus to the arcade, the intimate party scenes, the limestone quarry, the skatepark, and the prom. It’s a matter of being able to scale a project in a way that isn’t otherwise possible. Additionally, and importantly, I can take these stories further than what might be possible in real life.

BS: I always remain curious. It’s a constant for me. I’ve spent the past ten years in academia, working with young creatives, so I’ve had less time to pursue large photographic projects, but I’ve had more time to think about the creative process and what makes us human in our attempt to document our existence on this planet. EVIDENCE emerged as part of this inquiry.

Our entire visual output as humans has now been scanned and categorized, and I’m really interested in the threads that connect us across millennia of artistic creation. The handprints on the walls of Maros serve as a document, just as a portrait tells us there was a human on this planet who looked like this. I wanted to see if I could create something meaningful from all the data—something that might reveal more about who we are based on what we create.

BS: Photography is still a reference point. Even in EVIDENCE, I have referenced photography deep in the prompt architecture to find the threads in the creative process between various genres of art. But we are also in a moment when AI algorithms can make an incredibly accurate representation of a photograph. I’ve explored this with past projects like TRACES OF TRUTH, RAD, KIDZ. I wanted to take a departure from that and use this powerful technology to make deeper connections into the mystery of the creative process.

With EVIDENCE, it is a true collaboration, as much as this term is overused. I’m using the AI to create images based on prompts that ask how and why, rather than what. The data becomes a complete visual work. It is like an excavation, finding evidence of the deeper layers of consciousness in the creative process, and using this data to create new works that upon investigation, confirm the findings. I’ve created a data dashboard of all the works in EVIDENCE so collectors can learn more about each piece, how its traits contribute to its overall make up, and the relationship to the other works in the collection.

BS: Oh absolutely, the genie is out of the bottle! Once you discover what is possible there is no turning back. When I pick up a camera I am always looking for something I’ve never seen before, and working with AI gives me a new perspective from which to think about the possibilities.

BS: Most artists are excited about it. A segment of commercial photography is already being impacted, but this is the nature of advancement. Digital tools significantly lowered the barrier to entry in photography, and perhaps some of these jobs should never have existed. Painters worried about photography, photographers worried about Photoshop, and now they are concerned about how AI will impact them. If you look back at the history of art, technology has driven change since the Renaissance. I encourage them to embrace this change and master the tools.

BS: As long as humans are walking on this planet—or another planet—we will continue to make photographs. We have an existential drive to say, "We were here." It’s estimated that of the 12 trillion photographs taken since the invention of the Daguerreotype, 1.5 trillion have been taken in the past 17 years since the invention of the iPhone.

We’ve hit a tipping point—a saturation point, I think—where we have seen so many photographs that, as a culture, we’re not as interested anymore. Additionally, in this post-truth world, the idea that a photograph represents the truth no longer holds. You can remove a person from a picture with a single touch on the screen. Visual culture changes. We have been waiting for something new, and AI is that something new.