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“I’m 63, so I’ve lived through a number of pretty transformative iterations of our world, starting with the digitization of things, the internet. Not the industrial revolution – I’m not quite that old – and now AI.
Being a photographer and more specifically a photojournalist, I’ve always been on the cutting edge of innovation. I started out having to process black and white film and color slide film, and then color negative film and make prints that would then be photographed with a half-tone process and cut into a physical hot type plate just to be published.
I began at The Daily Texan at University of Texas, Austin, in 1983 and I didn’t pivot out of media until 2016. That’s a long and very intense career, working as an on-the-ground photographer, a photo editor and then a director of photography.
What (AI) will do is put us back in touch with our gut and our intuition.”
Judy Walgren
I lived through all those iterations of media, and every time there was an innovation there was a new iteration of our processes: Everyone would run around saying,‘The sky is falling, and we are all doomed.’ As a photographer, I never felt that. I always felt like the innovations were helping me do my job more efficiently and effectively. And if I wanted to revert back to analog processes, that was always available, and it still is.
I have lived through this multiple times as a visual communicator, so right away when people say, “Oh my God, the economy is doomed! Oh my God, it’s gonna crash!” I pause. I have been living like this for 50 years, and my adrenals are totally burned out… I am media and visually literate, right? So I just am not going to get pulled off into a doomsday spiral because of whatever I’m seeing being created.
I will be judged on this statement in 10 years – maybe in one year – but I always think that the hype outweighs the actual end result in the beginning.
I feel like what (AI) will do is put us back in touch with our gut and our intuition. What does the energy of the image say to me? You know, how am I feeling about that energy versus how am I intellectually reading the photograph in a semiotic way, right? Are you feeling like this is real or not?
It’s really critical for educators, starting at the preschool level, to be hitting home the notion of visual literacy of media. It has always been critical because of the way human beings process visual information. It’s at a much faster rate than how we process text at, and we get so many more messages, than we do with reading text.
This is not a new phenomenon. This has been going on since photography was invented – they’ve been doctoring the images. Sometimes it took weeks to do it. Then it took maybe a day to do it, and now it takes seconds.
I don’t want to say, “Oh my God, this is easy,” and sit back and chill. It’s not an easy time for lots of different reasons. But I do think that we need to stand back and give people, at least my students, the benefit of the doubt (that they) have the ability to learn how to see what’s real and what might not be real.”
Judy Walgren is an award-winning photojournalist. She is the chair of the photography department at Foothill College.
This profile is one of nineteen featured in the “Humans in an age of AI” portrait series. See more profiles here.
