In Decisive: Blurring the Lines, Arun Mista speaks with Henry Rice who discusses the interplay of modern technology, photography, and artificial intelligence. Using an iPhone 11 Pro’s QuickTake Video feature to capture five-second clips, he extracted 180 still images, which were then analysed for their semiotic content by ChatGPT-4.0. Through Midjourney, 180 AI-generated images were created to mirror the originals, blending human experience with machine interpretation. This collection of 360 images critiques the superficiality of networked visuals while exploring the dynamic relationship between individual identity and globalised culture. Rice's work reflects the shifting boundaries of photographic reality in an AI-driven age.

Explore the hidden world of introverts through Frankie McAllister's "Two Way Mirror" project. Discover how photography can capture the invisible struggles and unique perspectives of those who navigate an extrovert-dominated world. Join us for a thought-provoking journey into the power of quiet voices and the art of visual storytelling.

In the upheaval following WWI and the Russian Revolution, avant-garde artists rejected traditional romantic ideals for new anti-rational, abstract movements like Futurism. A leading figure was Viktor Shklovsky, who developed the concept of "defamiliarisation" or "making strange" - using artistic techniques to obscure familiar objects and perceptions to force the viewer to experience them anew. This challenged passive consumption of art in favour of an active process of perception and reconstruction. Futurist painters like Malevich embraced abstraction to radically defamiliarize art, while poets and writers experimented with unconventional language and narrative techniques. Though short-lived, Making Strange captured the radical imagination of an era of upheaval, when avant-garde artists sought to remake reality itself. In this post, Alun Misra connects the strategies used by the Futurists to photography now, and describes how he has used some these in his work and why.

Can you photograph joy? Exploring the elusive, transcendent nature of joy through the lens of philosophy and personal experience. Examining the limitations of capturing the essence of joy in a single image, and ideas for approaching it through abstract, conceptual photography. A thought-provoking perspective on the pursuit of this profound emotional state.

I thought you might like to know what compelled me to make a photo book from some very old colour slides taken almost half a century ago in Zambia. I found these in my mother-in-law’s house totally by accident and the images have acquired a new lease of life in the photo book ‘A new life in Zambia: Early photographs by Sant Kumar Jain’. I don’t take credit for this book. Most of the photographs were taken by my father-in-law who didn’t have any formal experience or training in photography. This is why the photographs have an innocence and freshness about them.

Why create a website for your photography? This is the question I asked myself over a year ago and concluded it was worth doing. Head over to my website and read about my trials and tribulations and get tips that may make it easier if you decide to go down this path. Let me know what you think.

The use of emotion and allegory in these two groundbreaking films is truly fascinating. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (2013) pose profound questions about humanity’s ability to shape its destiny and this is at the heart of both films. Both use space travel as a medium to tell their stories.

Transience is about the ebb and flow of the epic human journey from conception, through death and beyond into the vastness of the unknown. 

This work engages by the juxtaposition of ideas and seemingly unrelated images, sequenced to create a narrative that poses questions about nature, our capabilities, vulnerabilities and temporal existence. It is shaped by ideas and art contexts within which it sits and evokes responses from puzzlement and awe to a realisation of the fragility, brevity and insignificance of life

Silence is not an absence but a presence, not emptiness but repletion. Silence is something more than just a pause; it is the enchanted space in which things open up, and surfaces fall away, and we find ourselves in the midst of absolutes.