Thirty Years of Hearing It Will Never Catch On

I am old enough to remember the smell of the darkroom. Fixer on the fingers, the red glow, the slow bloom of an image rising through the tray. And I am old enough to remember what the photographers around me said when digital arrived. The colours aren't right. It's nowhere near film. It will never catch on. They said it with complete certainty, the way people always do just before the world changes underneath them.

I went to digital anyway. Not because I loved it more than film — I didn't, not at first — but because I could feel what it offered. Speed. Control. The ability to see, adjust, and see again. The photograph stopped being a gamble developed hours later and became a conversation held in the moment.

Then it happened again. DSLRs gave way to mirrorless, and the same voices returned. Too small. Too fiddly. Nobody will take you seriously turning up with one of those. I picked one up and understood within minutes that the argument was already over. What you see is what you get. The viewfinder showed me the exposure, the shadow, the mood — the finished feeling of the image — before I ever pressed the shutter. For someone whose entire work lives in shadow, that was not a convenience. That was everything.

I remember the video years too. The professionals I worked with swore by a machine called the Casablanca — a dedicated editing box, a piece of furniture almost, humming away in the corner of the room. I told them plainly that one day all of it would be done on a Mac. They laughed. I don't say this to claim I was clever. I say it because I have now lived through this exact conversation four or five times, and the shape of it never changes. Something new arrives. The people most invested in the old way declare it false, inferior, not real. And then, quietly, it becomes the way everything is done.

Editing is the clearest example. There are people who believe that working on an image afterwards is somehow a modern corruption — as if Ansel Adams didn't spend longer under the enlarger than he ever did on the mountain. Dodging, burning, holding back a sky, lifting a shadow: this is not new. It is the second half of photography, and it always has been. The tools changed from trays of chemicals to a sophisticated machine on a desk, but the intention — to make the print carry what the moment actually felt like — is the oldest intention in the craft.

And now the conversation has arrived at AI, and the voices are saying exactly what they said in every decade before. It isn't real. It doesn't reflect true life. It will never be accepted. I have heard this speech so many times I could deliver it myself.

Here is where I stand. There is a difference — a vast one — between typing a sentence into a website and receiving a picture in seconds, and using serious, engineered tools on your own machine, offline, in your own hands, to refine a photograph you stood in a cold building to take. The first is a shortcut to nowhere. The second is the darkroom, continued. My photographs begin where they have always begun: with me, physically present, waiting in a silent room until the light does what I came for. What happens afterwards at the desk is finishing — the same finishing photographers have done for a century and a half, with better instruments. I have written before about what happens when technical perfection becomes the goal instead of feeling, and this is the same principle from the other side: the tool is never the point. The eye is the point.

Thirty years has taught me one thing about photography and technology, and it is this: the resistance is never really about the tool. It is about the fear that the craft someone spent decades mastering might not be the moat they thought it was. But craft was never the moat. Seeing is the moat. A new camera, a new sensor, a new piece of software — none of it has ever once told me where to stand, or when to wait, or why a particular fall of light through a particular window matters. That part has no upgrade path. That is the part I explain in my creative process, and it is the only part that has ever separated one photographer from another.

And I can say this without flinching, because I have earned the right to say it. I have honed this craft for decades. I have shot in every situation this work can throw at you — interiors, venues, celebrities, assignments abroad where there is no second chance and no excuse. Hand me any light, any room, anywhere on this planet, and I will come back with the photograph. I have studied this craft my whole working life and I still study it now, because I have never once felt that my training is finished. So when someone suggests that a tool is doing the work, I can answer plainly: I do not need AI to teach me how to take a photograph. I need nothing to teach me that. What I take from any tool — the enlarger, the sensor, the software — is simply a better way to deliver what my eye already found.

The men who told me digital would never catch on — I sometimes wonder where their negatives are now. Boxed in lofts, most likely, curling slightly, waiting for someone to remember them. Meanwhile the thing they said wasn't real photography went on to make every photograph the world now sees. I think about that whenever a new voice tells me, with complete certainty, what will never catch on. I have stopped listening to certainty. I listen to the work. If the print on the wall holds silence the way the room held it — if it makes someone stop in a hallway and feel something they can't name — then the tools that made it have already justified themselves, the same way the enlarger did, the same way the little mirrorless body did, the same way the Mac did while the Casablanca hummed on in the corner, certain of its future.