Art, content, and a punk movement of landscape photography

2 June 2025

Some people call us creators, but I would call us artists. I would argue that both exist, co-exist, live in symbiosis, feed into each other, but they're still different things. The line between them is blurred. Sometimes I create content. It's just to feed someone elses social media feeds with. It might be more rushed, less creative, and more about the quantity. Something for every day for someone else to shove down the throat of the internet in hopes that it resonates with someone. But sometimes that's what has to be done to keep this rolling.

But most times, I would say I create art. It just holds a different quality, has had more thought going through it, more time spent refining it, more emotions self-sabotagingly hating it. And I despise the trends out there of demoting others' work from being art into just content.

Still, creativity creates. Art is used as content. And content sometimes rises to Art.

31 August 2025

I almost gave in this time. I wrote to my AI named Odin to write me a newsletter for me. It would have been so easy. I've even trained it to write like me, even though it still thinks I write like shit. I let it write a newsletter. It was full of things like "awe-inspiring", "painting light", "serene sunset glow" and "majestic peaks of timeless solitude and strength overlooking the eternal horizon".

It sounded like it had been sitting on the toilet for days.

I threw 7 our of my 12 laptops against the wall (I keep one for every memory card I shoot of course) just to get over the perfected pretenciousness of what it thinks landscape photographuy should sound like. And I started writing with my own thumbs and other fingers. Which is why I first of all have nothing really important to say, but also no direction of where this is going.

I'm sure AI will perfect this too in a month or a year or more, to the point where you will no longer know if this is me writing, if I even took this photo, or if I'm even real anymore.

Landscape photography has always sought a level of perfection, both technically, and word-poop description-wise, that was very quickly overachieved by AI. It's gotten too perfect in every way.

So maybe it's time to go in the other direction. With everything. Like a punk movement of landscape photography. Write your own stuff and stop sounding so fake polite and poetic. Actually don't even spell check. Shouw your human faults and shortcomings.

Take photos out of focus, shake that camera with your unsteady hands. Don't spot remove that plastic bag, and don't editi it to look like AI. Keep shit raw. And let your personality shine through it.

Until AI learns how to do that too. Then I'm automating everything.

But until then, check out my print, where I tried to get everything as technically correct as possible, in focus, edited to look as good as if it was done by AI, but without removing the little spots of imperfection. Because I'm starting somewhere.