AARON HUEY: A NEW PHOTOGRAPHIC RENAISSANCE?

Aaron Huey: In the mid to late 1990s, I studied painting, printmaking, and sculpture in Denver, Colorado, and later at the Škola úžitkového výtvarníctva Josefa Vydru in Bratislava, Slovakia. As I began to travel to more remote parts of the world, I found photography to be the most portable tool for making art. With the locations becoming increasingly isolated and extreme, I found myself in extraordinary situations, such as protests in Iran, Myanmar, and Taliban schools pre-9/11. I started to see the opportunity to create stories that went deeper than the aesthetics of single images, so I began returning to places and living in those communities to produce a different kind of image.

I actually put my entire origin story as a photographer on-chain with a project called FIRST FILM. Shot in Svaneti in the Georgian Caucasus from 1998 to 2000, it includes literally every frame—every blurry and boring thought and hesitation, but also every risk, breakthrough, and reward that made me a photographer and resulted in the body of work that launched my career with National Geographic. I eventually became a contributing photographer and editor for several of their magazines and created nearly 40 feature photo projects, including several cover stories.

My journey from painting, printmaking, and sculpture to photography continues to influence my work and my approach to composition and texture, even in my most technologically advanced projects today.

AH: The definitions and tools of photography have changed significantly over time. However, photography has always been a fluid and evolving practice since its invention in the 1820s, continuously reshaped by technological advancements and cultural shifts. As we move further into the digital age, the concept of the lens is no longer confined to capturing light through a piece of glass. Lenses and cameras have become exponentially more sophisticated over the past few decades, embedded with complex algorithms that interpret data and are even created from those algorithms. Novel and non-lens-based imaging techniques existed before I picked up a camera, but my familiarity and acceptance of them have taken me on a journey from black-and-white film to synthetic photography with custom LoRAs.

In my own life, I went through most of the major stages (barring the camera obscura and the daguerreotype centuries/decades). From my pre-cellphone black-and-white film days to years spent learning the merciless exposure of slide film on a rangefinder—a Leica M6 and a single lens used on my solo 154-day walk across the U.S.—to the first digital DSLRs as I covered protests and wars in the early 2000s, and then into the decade of smartphone photography. I was part of the core group of two dozen photographers that built up the @natgeo Instagram account with daily posts starting in early 2012, growing it from hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of followers. Each of these stages represented a shift in both photography and in me, in how I saw the world and in the tools available to create images.

AH: The Instagram phenomenon coincided closely with a major shift when cell phone cameras became part of everyone's lives—it meant that there were almost no people without cameras anymore. Everyone became a photographer. This was a radical reshaping of the photographic landscape because much of what makes a great photograph is the timing of being in the right place. Now that everyone had a camera, all instances and moments could be photographed, not just when people with special equipment were around.

When we gained access to the National Geographic Instagram feed in early 2012, with only a couple of hundred thousand followers, it felt quite freeing. We were all accustomed to lengthy processes: going into the field, returning, making edits, and undergoing rounds of revisions with editors at all levels of the publication until something was deemed worthy of publication. But suddenly, we could use the phone camera in our pocket or upload a picture we wanted to share. We mixed imagery from behind the scenes and in-between moments of life in big, global stories. Being able to show the imperfect was both a relief and invaluable. There was real power in it too—especially pre-algorithm—because when you shared an idea, words, and an image that you knew would reach 100 to 200 million, approaching 300 million people, those images and words could change reality.

AH: I have always been restless, so within the framework of National Geographic’s stories, once I saw the scale and potential, I wanted greater depth to match the scope of its reach. This drove me to explore new technology and collaboration to take photo stories further.

Those initial shifts involved community-generated work, collaborating with the people I was documenting. Then I moved into spatial photography, discovering photogrammetry and the ability to immerse people in spatial worlds through VR, AR, and eventually metaverse environments made entirely of photographic surfaces and sound. I eventually began working with images that did not rely on a glass lens or the exposure of light, such as my projects with scanning electron microscopes.

In 2021, when I discovered virtual cameras and avatars, I started documenting gaming worlds and the multiverse of emerging metaverse environments. I became the first Nat Geo photographer to go on assignment in these spaces, capturing incredible moments of human connection in virtual worlds. I found myself photographing everything from women giving birth in Second Life (which really surprised Nat Geo!) to virtual meditation gatherings where people around the globe came together for shared spiritual practice. I documented private parties where b-boys—wearing body trackers on the other side of the world from me—danced around virtual bonfires, performing backspins and handstands while DJs spun records. These global communities connected in ways that would be impossible in the physical world. That project opened my eyes to a whole new way of exploring and creating imagery, eventually evolving into my LEAP and Edge Studies series. Each of these shifts in technology and approach has expanded my perception of what photography can be, leading me to my current explorations in AI-assisted imagery and virtual space documentation.

AH: Traditional editorial media has been in freefall for the past decade, and many of the publishers that helped build my foundation are, for the most part, unable or unwilling to fund the kind of work that truly excites me.

Today, the stories I create require a different kind of container for both exhibition and publishing, often involving some form of algorithmic lens applied to my archive. This new aspect of my practice allows me to reinterpret and reimagine decades of imagery, creating new photographic works from the foundation of my historical image collections. Inherent in this is a challenge to the conventional definitions of photography accepted by most of my peers in the world of photojournalism.

By using my archive as a new lens, I can untether myself from the act of capturing a singular decisive moment. In projects like WALLPAPER FOR THE END OF THE WORLD, I can engage in an ongoing process of exploration and creation from those seeds of the past. What emerges is a hybrid reality where what is and was converges with what is not (or cannot be), as well as what could be in some future world—a multiversal viewfinder looking through another kind of lens. Because this new set of lenses has become so dominant in my work, I have collected it all in one place, where I discuss working in and with machines.

This evolution of my practice helps me bridge the gap between traditional photojournalism and new media art at a time when our understanding of both photography and the fabric of reality itself is constantly shifting.

AH: I have a lot of work that shows either the causes or effects of the climate crisis, but it was all published and then gathered dust on hard drives. I wanted to bring it to life again as we watched new global heat and weather records fall in the summer of 2023. My goal was to take the conversation and these bodies of work beyond publications and into public spaces. When I discovered the infinite tiling capabilities of some of these platforms, it clicked, and I realized I could turn them into patterns that could cover walls—literal wallpaper.

This project also emerged while I was observing the heated debates about AI not being photography and the perception of it as an atrocity and threat to all of us. I had always viewed this as a photographic practice and wanted to find ways to enhance it as a photographic process by basing it on my own imagery. My solution, across several projects, was to use concept trainers or even merge two or more of my own images to find a reality between them, using image prompts instead of text prompts.

For this wallpaper, I needed just one word: I added only pattern names like "damask" or "toile de jouy" to bypass the usual multi-word, multi-signal text prompts such as "fire," "flames," or "burning trees." This allowed for as pure an interpretation as possible of my own photos processed as specific pattern types.

I loved how this approach let me revisit my climate archive and history in new ways. For example, when I looked back at my Hurricane Katrina images from 20 years ago, I often felt disappointed—I wasn't a fully formed photographer yet, and I wished I had turned my head, tried a different lens, or returned to a place. I could see what I had shot and imagine what was missing and how I would approach it differently now. Using these tools, I was able to return to that moment in my archive, to turn my head in another direction through this wallpaper, and to look around inside the event of Hurricane Katrina again. That's how I think about using these tools—they allow me to revisit, re-examine, and re-photograph ideas, places, times, and people.

AH: These are definitely my earliest memories. I have always been a relentless maker, working in every medium I can get my hands on. I grew up in a very small town in Wyoming, where I explored media and subjects that were unfamiliar and uncomfortable for my rural audience. In 1994, at age 18, I went straight from that small town to live in Bratislava, Slovakia, where I studied stone sculpture and printmaking at the Škola úžitkového výtvarníctva Josefa Vydru. Eventually, I picked up a camera during my travels, and that has been my primary art form and source of income for the past 25 years.

I am also an obsessive physical builder, comfortable with concrete, wood, and metal. I am currently constructing an artist-in-residence project within a large conservation project covering several hundred acres in Southern California, about an hour outside of LA. I do most of the work myself and consider every element of this—from the carpentry to the gatherings I will host—to be part of my work as an artist as well.

AH: The transition to AI feels completely natural to me because I've never really felt an allegiance to any particular medium. My artistic practice throughout my life has always involved picking up new tools and evolving my process. When AI image generators became publicly available in 2021, it felt like discovering another natural extension of my creative process. What artist wouldn't be intrigued and excited by an infinite image generator? I definitely saw it as a new kind of camera. While photography captures what is and was, photographic imagery made with AI (synthetic photography) can show what was not, what cannot be, or what could be in some future or alternate world.

Some of my first uses of this new tool were projects like CURRENCY OF PROTEST, where I merged AI-generated imagery created with early versions of Midjourney with physical objects. I designed double-sided banknotes printed on seed paper, playing with the common protest phrase, "They tried to bury us; they didn't know we were seeds." These were specifically created for a show called PAINT THE PROTEST, curated by Nancy Spector in New York, which opened in October 2021. Everyone who entered the gallery could walk in, pick up one of these physical banknotes from a pile on the ground, and take it with them. They could then choose to plant it in the soil, where, theoretically, it could sprout wildflowers. So this was very much work with my hands and with AI.

Most recently, a project with my daughter Juno brought together many physical elements with photography and AI in NANO SKETCHES. For this project, I collected radiolarians (ancient microplankton that have been around for 550 million years), coated them with silver, and photographed them with a scanning electron microscope to create a large archive of images. I then trained a LoRA on these images and ran my 8-year-old's drawings through it via a concept trainer to create new AI-assisted collaborations that effectively wrapped her drawings in my photographic work. So where is the divide between what was done with my hands, what was done with a camera, and what was done with AI? It's all interwoven and cannot be separated. The most interesting work to me is art that exists in multiple states simultaneously—physical and digital, personal and collaborative, and fluid across genres.

AH: Definitely—though interestingly—with AI projects like GASOLINE GARDENS or my AI image merging, I did not have direct inspirations. These ideas came from my own visions, which is exciting. We are literally dealing with a new medium. It's not just a new kind of photography; it is photographic, but it's really an entirely new medium. This makes it possible to create work without as much influence.

This is quite different from traditional photography where, for instance, if you're photographing in the American West, you know what that photography looked like historically. You know what Ansel Adams, Richard Avedon, Stephen Shore, Bill Allard, and Joel Sternfeld photographed. It's impossible to escape the influence and knowledge of what has been done before and where one fits into it. If you're a good student of the genre and locations, you'll always understand when you're crossing into a homage to a great master, whether by consciously or subconsciously borrowing a technique or referencing a place because you saw it photographed by another.

But with these new AI tools, I found myself working on a truly blank canvas. I did not have a visual language in my mind or in the world to reference for projects like GASOLINE GARDENS or NANO SKETCHES with my daughter Juno. This was quite different from my early work in other media like sculpture, painting, and printmaking, where I often mimicked the seemingly inescapable techniques and themes of art history. But now, with this new toolset, I find myself working in a space where new visions can emerge without the canon of reference points.

AH: Yes, particularly because the period from the 18th century into the Victorian era marked a substantial evolution in the decorative arts, during which wallpapers and tapestries became increasingly elaborate ways to both beautify spaces and tell stories about empire, commerce, and environmental change. The patterns from this period—like Toile de Jouy with its pastoral scenes or chinoiserie depicting idealized exotic landscapes—essentially documented and aestheticized their own era's global transformations. I find an interesting parallel with our current moment, where I'm using these same decorative formats to document our climate crisis and social upheaval.

What really drew me to these historical patterns was how they made difficult realities palatable for domestic spaces—they turned scenes of colonization and environmental exploitation into beautiful, repeating patterns for wealthy homes. I'm doing something similar, but inverted: taking our contemporary crises—wildfires, hurricanes, oil refineries—and transforming them into wallpaper patterns that can inhabit domestic spaces while carrying their uncomfortable truths.

AH: The recent US presidential election results set a whole new stage for this collection, as the US enters a time of climate denial as official policy. Trump has dismissed climate change as a "hoax" and withdrew the U.S. from the 2015 Paris climate agreement during his first term, with plans to repeat this action in his second term. He has also vowed to boost fossil fuel production, eliminate incentives for clean energy and electric vehicles, and roll back emissions-reduction regulations. The climate crisis was always going to be a difficult battle, but with science deniers and climate deniers running the U.S., we are certain to accelerate the crisis. It is impossible to ignore this new context when viewing this collection post-election.

AH: My only real prediction is what we already know is guaranteed: that nothing will stay the same. Tools and technology will evolve, and the new will slowly become old, to be replaced by the new again and again. Perhaps outrage will erupt again over another new medium in another 10 or 100 years, just as it did with photography in the 1800s and just as it has with AI. The only certainty is change itself.

AH: I don't hold my breath for critics and gallerists to declare a new photographic renaissance. It has been happening for a long time, but they are only willing to talk about the moments when money flows, which is different from when talent and ingenuity flow.

That said, there is undoubtedly a renaissance happening in AI-assisted photographic imagery and video. It is an entirely new medium that allows for rapid iterations, artistic growth, and the emergence of new talent with substantial bodies of work. This work is often so far removed from reality that it poses no dangers, but at other times, it may work against the photojournalistic craft.

Paglen is right about the link between a photograph and the outside world being broken. Photojournalism is desperately needed right now. I have watched the world separate from reality, especially over the past eight years or so of culture wars here in the US, and I am not optimistic. So many people these days don't believe the proof in front of their eyes. Even with an image, one can now just say it's fake if one doesn't like the ideas contained in it.

I can hold two seemingly contradictory positions simultaneously: as an artist, I'm deeply excited by these tools and their creative potential; and as someone who has worked extensively in photojournalism and who recently served as a Stanford Starling Lab fellow focusing on data integrity, I'm acutely aware of the implications and risks to the fabric of reality. This duality doesn't feel like a conflict to me—it's simply part of engaging thoughtfully with transformative new technologies. I am an artist with a camera, and so I will use the full range of "cameras" available.