Text and images used by permission.
A clawfoot bathtub full of flowers, discovered in the woods, bathed in soft, warm light. A strange theatrical prop airplane on a pylon, found in a desert landscape. A billboard by a country road with colors that perfectly echo an orange and purple sunset. All are images from the work of artist-photographer David Baltzer, all apparently examples of serendipitous discoveries captured in his travels around the country. All striking images and all entirely artificial, all captured by no camera at all.
Baltzer did not travel beyond the perimeter of his studio and never turned away from his computer to create this issue’s portfolio. Every image in this collection came from typed prompts, fed into an AI model, refined through repeated iterations until the picture in his mind matched the picture on his screen. To many working photographers, this will sound like heresy — a violation of everything the medium is supposed to mean. No shutter. No light hitting a sensor. No decisive moment, in Cartier-Bresson's sense, because there was no moment at all.
The "heretics" themselves focus on what photography has always actually been: an act of seeing something before it exists as an image, then using available tools to make that vision visible to others. Man Ray pioneered cameraless photography. Ansel Adams spent hours in the darkroom, dodging and burning negatives into scenes that never looked quite like what his camera recorded. Jerry Uelsmann used seven enlargers and trick photography to see the surreal. Photography has never been pure documentation — it's been curation, composition, and intent, expressed through whatever technology the era offered. David Baltzer would argue his prompts are simply a new kind of aperture setting, his iterative refinement a new kind of darkroom. The eye behind the work — deciding what's worth making, what light means, and what a face should say — is still entirely his.
Whether you find that argument persuasive or infuriating, the images demand a response, one that considers the tension between craft and creation, between what a photograph is and what it might become.
