We all wish we could go back to the good ‘ol days. A time when things were simpler. For most of us, that’s the time when we were kids, or teenagers, or maybe taking our first steps into adulthood.

For those of us born before the internet era, the only way we’ve been able to experience a glimpse back into that time is through old photographs and maybe some low-resolution family videos. But what if we could experience the past as if we were living it now?

A.I. is trying to answer that.

A “POV” of waking up in the 80s. An “AI avatar” sent back to roam a 90s mall. Kids in 2025 receive a tearful video message from their AI-generated younger selves, urging them to put down their phones and go play outside. Prompt-generated nostalgic images are filling feeds in response to the yearning of both older and younger generations for an era that no longer exists.

For the millions of people who consume this content, it’s almost like time traveling. Stepping back into a world that no longer exists.

Here’s the problem, though.

None of it happened. None of these scenes were filmed, lived, or witnessed by anyone. They’re generated on demand from a prompt. This is not even a real place. It’s a plausible-looking guess at one, assembled by a model that has never actually seen 1980 or 1992, only millions of photographs that claim to be from those eras.

We’ve always been nostalgic for eras we know mostly through other people’s photographs — that’s not new. What’s new is that we can now manufacture the photographs themselves, and the gap between remembering something and generating something that looks like a memory is collapsing fast enough that most people scrolling past aren’t stopping to ask which one they’re looking at.

So what happens when we start manufacturing our memories? And how do we preserve the truth of the past when people so easily cling to the idea of a moment instead of its reality?

Nostalgia Has Always Been a Little Bit Fiction

To be fair to the trend, nostalgia was never purely accurate to begin with. The version of the 90s most people are nostalgic for — sun-bleached, analog, free-range, soundtracked by a mixtape — was always a curated slice of a much messier decade. Photographs themselves have always done a kind of editing too: you only take pictures of the good day, the lake trip, the birthday party, not the ordinary Tuesday. Memory was always doing some of this work for free, smoothing edges, keeping the warm parts, and letting the rest fade.

So, in one sense, AI nostalgia content is just doing faster and more aggressively what photography and memory were already doing slowly. It’s not inventing the impulse to romanticize the past. It’s industrializing it.

But there’s a difference between memory rounding off the edges of something that happened and a model generating a scene with no underlying event to round off in the first place. One is a distortion of a true thing. The other is a true-looking thing with nothing underneath it.

An Imagined Past Made Real (Sort Of)

What makes the A.I. nostalgia trend different from, say, an artist creating something from their own memory of the past is its ability to mimic reality while having no actual basis in it.

A.I can generate entire scenes, entire “memories,” of moments that never happened to anyone, populated by people who were never there, often depicting decades the person generating the content never lived through at all.

A 19-year-old generating an AI video of themselves as a kid in 1994 isn’t drawing from a memory they had to relive it. They’re manufacturing a childhood. Not their own — a generic one, built from the visual residue of a thousand other people’s real childhoods, scraped and blended into something that has the texture of memory without being attached to a single actual life.

It’s not just nostalgia for a real past. In many cases, it’s nostalgia for a past that was never anyone’s — a kind of ambient longing for an aesthetic, detached entirely from lived experience, that still elicits a genuine emotional response in the person watching it. The feeling is real. The memory triggering it is not.

The Bigger Problem

This is where it stops being a TikTok curiosity and becomes something anyone who takes images seriously should pay attention to.

For as long as photography has existed, the photograph has carried an implicit claim: I was there, and this is roughly what it looked like. That claim is the entire reason photographs have historically functioned as evidence — in journalism, in court, in family archives, in the box of prints in your parents’ closet that prove, irrefutably, that the events of your childhood took place.

AI-generated nostalgia content doesn’t make that claim and mostly isn’t trying to deceive anyone outright — most viewers know, on some level, that it’s generated. But the visual grammar it borrows is the grammar of evidence. It uses grain, flash overexposure, and period-accurate styling specifically because those signals read as documentation to the human eye.

It’s borrowing the credibility of the photograph without doing what earned it credibility in the first place: someone being there with a camera, capturing life as it is in that moment.

Multiply that by a few more years of model improvement, and the line between “content styled to evoke the past” and “content indistinguishable from a real photograph of the past” gets thinner. People who study photojournalism for a living have been raising versions of this alarm for a while now — warning that once synthetic imagery becomes common and good enough, it doesn’t just create individual fakes; it has the potential to quietly reshape what we collectively believe the past looked like, depending on whose version got generated, and how widely it spread.

The nostalgia trend feels low-stakes because nobody’s claiming the 90s mall video is a real historical document. But it’s training an entire generation’s eye to read AI-generated period imagery as emotionally and visually credible. That’s not nothing. That’s the exact skill a more dangerous use of the same technology would depend on.

Photography as a Protection of the Past

This is the place where the photographer’s role becomes more of a civic one, even when the work itself is personal — a wedding, a family portrait, a quiet afternoon.

A real photograph, taken by a person who was actually present, is a small act of evidence-making. It says: this happened, here, to these people, and I was close enough to see it. No model can manufacture that claim honestly, no matter how convincing the grain or the lighting gets, because the claim isn’t really about the image. It’s about the presence behind it.

That’s worth saying plainly to clients, and worth holding onto as a working photographer in a moment when “looks real” is becoming cheap and “is real” is becoming the actual differentiator. The two used to be the same thing. They aren’t anymore, and the gap between them is where the work’s value now lies.

A few things to consider, practically:

Talk about presence as the product, not just the photos. What you’re actually selling, more than ever, is the fact that you were physically there for something true. That’s worth naming out loud to clients, not assuming they already understand it.

Be plain about your process. If you use AI for culling, editing, or color work — most working photographers do — say so, and say what it touched and what it didn’t. Clarity itself is becoming part of what builds trust, separate from the technical result.

Protect your own archive like it matters, because it does. The unglamorous, half-blurry, badly lit photos sitting on your hard drive are increasingly exactly the kind of unmanufactured evidence that’s becoming rarer and more valuable. Don’t think of your backlog as just raw material. Think of it as a record.

Remember what nostalgia is supposed to cost. Real nostalgia is expensive — it costs you the years it took to get far enough away from something to miss it.

AI-generated nostalgia is free and instant, and that’s exactly what should make you suspicious of it. The feeling it produces is real. The thing it claims to be a memory of is not. Worth knowing the difference, especially if your job is to make the kind of images people will be nostalgic for one day.

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A24 just released their first summer horror flick, The Backrooms, and it’s a truly wild experiment for the studio known for taking big swings at new ideas. Instead of being based on the traditional horror pillars of old folklore, this film draws from much more recent urban legends born in the digital town squares we now inhabit: online message boards.

So, how did one lo-fi image of an unknown room spark the imagination of thousands of netizens, spawning hundreds of pages of online lore, a YouTube indie horror series, and finally, a major box office production?

The Origin of “The Backrooms”

“Post disquieting images that just feel…off.”

This simple prompt popped up on a message board on the popular, deeply unserious online forum 4chan. Attached to it was a low-res image of a yellow room. No windows, no doors, just a corridor of carpet with seemingly disjointed walls covered in mismatched yellow wallpaper.

It’s eerie. It’s seemingly out of time and place. It even has an odd tilt to the frame that makes it feel like the room is sitting at an uncomfortable angle.

So it fit the bill to get replies rolling in, other users posting their own odd images. And its internet footprint might have ended there if another user hadn’t chimed in later in the thread.

This visceral description took a single off-putting image and suddenly captured the imaginations of dozens of people. Within days, new threads were popping up across Reddit and other forums with users posting their own images of what they believed represented the “backrooms” of reality — liminal spaces that aren’t meant to be explored.

What Makes a Great “Backrooms” Image?

As the internet lore of the Backrooms started to take shape, so did a specific aesthetic for the images used to fuel it.

Most are extremely low-resolution, often taken by early digital point-and-shoots that could only muster a few megapixels at best. This makes the spaces feel even more unfinished, as if they haven’t been fully rendered — like a dream you can’t quite hold onto when you wake up.

The spaces themselves are, first and foremost, devoid of people. They feature long stretches of hallways or oddly shaped rooms without windows. Fluorescent lights are almost always the only source of illumination, bathing the environment in the unsettling, unnatural glow we associate with offices, retail stockrooms, or basements at 2 a.m.

Essentially, “Backrooms” images intentionally defy every rule of “good” photography — nothing is aesthetic, captivating, or balanced. They are exactly the kind of images that make you feel so unsettled you don’t want to look at them for too long.

But that’s precisely what makes them impossible to look away from. The original image makes the stomach turn. A feeling of wrongness you can’t quite name.

It’s an objectively “bad” photo. And yet paired with a little bit of creative storytelling, it’s more captivating than 90% of the high-res images cluttering my feed — and 100% of the polished AI images floating around out there.

The Uniting Force of Storytelling

The Backrooms lore is essentially a global collective art project. The first photo set the vibe. The first comment gave us the core thesis. And that alone was enough for hundreds of other creatives to build on, extending this urban legend into something no single person could have designed on purpose.

The mechanism behind this phenomenon is simpler than it sounds: image (visual reference) + narrative frame = emotional experience. Neither element alone does what both do together. The image creates a visual anchor point. The narrative framing creates meaning.

This is a principle that extends far beyond internet horror. It’s the difference between a photograph of a chair and a photograph of your grandfather’s chair, still sitting where he left it the morning he died.

The chair is the same. What changes is how we frame it when we share it with our audience.

From One Thread to a Movie Ticket

Within months of that original post, dedicated Reddit communities were cataloguing different “levels” of the Backrooms, each with its own aesthetic, rules, and creatures. Users built elaborate wikis. Artists contributed their own imagery. What started as a single image and a single paragraph became collaborative world-building at a scale most professional creative teams couldn’t manufacture if they tried.

Then came Kane Pixels. In 2022, a then-teenager named Kane Parsons posted a found-footage YouTube video imagining a camera crew accidentally ending up in the Backrooms.

Shot with the same aesthetic sensibility as the original image (grainy, off-kilter, fluorescent-lit), it went viral almost instantly, eventually accumulating millions of views and spawning a full series.

And now A24 is bringing it to theaters. Not bad for a blurry photo of a yellow room that broke every rule of good photography.

Think Like a Storyteller, Not a Technician

Technicians are all about optimization and efficiency. They solve for the correct answer. And there are absolutely contexts where that’s exactly what’s needed. But when you’re making images, you want to move people; technical correctness is at best a foundation and at worst a crutch.

Storytellers ask different questions. Not “is the light right?” but “how does this light serve my story?”

Not “is this in focus?” but what does it mean that it isn’t.

A few questions worth building into your practice:

What does this image leave unresolved?

Ambiguity isn’t a flaw to correct — it’s an invitation. The images that stay with people are rarely the ones that explain themselves completely.

What is the story inside the frame?

Not how you made the photo, but what exists in the world of the image. Who was just here? What is about to happen? What’s the emotional weight of this specific moment in this specific place?

Does your caption activate or flatten the image?

Most captions close the loop — they tell the viewer what to think. Try writing toward the sensation instead. Give people just enough language to fall into the image, then get out of the way.

Are you solving the wrong problem?

If you’re spending 80% of your creative energy on technical execution and 20% on what you actually want the image to say, the ratio might be worth examining.

The Gap Between Correct and Effective

The Backrooms didn’t succeed because it was well-made. It succeeded because it made people feel something they couldn’t explain, and gave them just enough of a story to want to go deeper. One photograph. One paragraph. An entire creative universe.

That’s the gap worth chasing — not the gap between your current technical skill and perfect technical skill, but the gap between images that are “correct” and images that are effective. Between work that demonstrates mastery and work that makes someone put their phone down and sit with something for a minute.

That’s the difference between a photographer and a storyteller.

The best ones are always both.

[Photo credit: NASA]

I’ve been soaking in moon joy this month. The Artemis II mission has become a bright spot in our collective human experience, showing us the power of human ingenuity, willpower, and the desire to do big things. And as a photographer, seeing new images of the Earth and the moon fills me with a sense of wonder and existential awe about the universe and our place in it.

Those photographs are more than pretty space pictures, though. They were a mission-critical task that the four astronauts of Artemis II were sent up there to capture. Before Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen were cleared to fly around the Moon, they spent roughly 20 hours learning how to take photographs.

Two professional photography instructors, Paul Reichert and Katrina Willoughby — both graduates of the Rochester Institute of Technology’s photographic sciences program — built a specialized training curriculum for the crew. It ranged from basic skills like framing and managing glare to advanced, space-specific challenges like working in microgravity and reading light in an environment utterly unlike anything on Earth.

They even constructed a dedicated simulation — an inflatable moon and an Orion spacecraft mock-up — so the crew could practice in conditions that approximated the real thing.

But why is NASA still relying on humans to look through a lens and press a shutter? Because NASA understands something professional photographers have known since the camera was invented.

Great images don’t come from great cameras. They come from people who know how to really see.

First, The Gear

The workhorse camera for Artemis II was the Nikon D5. A 2016 model that isn’t even in production anymore.

Why not bring the most cutting-edge technology available on such a historic mission? Reichert explained it simply: the D5 had years of proven performance aboard the International Space Station. It had demonstrated it could handle radiation, microgravity, and temperature shifts. With no repair shop available for a few hundred thousand miles, they could trust it to perform when they needed it to.

They also brought a Nikon Z9 and several lenses — a 14-24mm wide zoom, an 80-400mm telephoto, a 35mm — along with one late addition to the equipment list that photographers everywhere will recognize: an iPhone 17 Pro Max.

This photo of Christina Koch gazing at Earth was shot on that iPhone.

[Photo credit: NASA]

Some of the most impactful images from this mission were captured by the camera bouncing around in your pocket right now. The Artemis II mission became, inadvertently, the best possible argument for choosing the right tool over the newest one — and for how subject and storytelling will nearly always trump technical specs.

Art and Science are Not Opposing Ideas, They’re Partners

Here’s what NASA understood when they sent astronauts into space with these cameras: human observation is a technical, scientific skill that cannot be replaced by any technology we currently possess.

NASA trained the Artemis II crew specifically in lunar observation — studying crater shapes, surface textures, color variations, and reflectivity. During the mission’s seven-hour lunar flyby, Commander Wiseman reported to ground teams with precise descriptions of color nuances, texture differences, and light reflections from the surface. He also relayed something no satellite or algorithm could transmit — what it actually feels like to gaze upon the lunar surface.

“No matter how long we look at this, our brains are not processing this image in front of us. It is absolutely spectacular, surreal. I know there’s no adjectives. I’m going to need to invent some new ones to describe what we are looking at out this window.” — Reid Wiseman

That is what separates these images from a satellite that clicks away on a schedule, or an AI rendering a data-driven approximation. It’s the human eye. Images created by the choice to look, to notice, to select, to feel.

What This Means for Your Creative Practice

None of us are shooting in lunar orbit. But the lesson lands here on Earth just the same.

The Artemis II photography program is proof that seeing — and filtering your observations through a lens — is an irreplaceable skill. Your ability to observe, to frame, to describe is not a soft skill. It is a technical capability with real-world stakes. The photographers who build lasting practices in the next decade won’t be the ones with the best gear or the fastest turnaround. They’ll be the ones who’ve done the deep work of learning to see more acutely than anyone else, and who can translate that seeing into images that make other people feel what they felt.

There’s also something here about the relationship between technical mastery and intimacy with your tools. The Artemis II crew used a ten-year-old camera to produce images that circled the globe within hours. The D5 wasn’t chosen for its specs — it was chosen because the people using it knew exactly what it would do in any condition. That reliability freed them to focus on what mattered: what they were seeing, and how to capture it honestly.

The photographers I admire most have worked with their cameras long enough that the equipment disappears. The gear stops being a question. The image becomes the only question.

A Closing Thought on Human Proof

We live in an age where images are becoming cheap and trust is expensive. The Artemis II photographs matter — scientifically, historically, culturally — in part because they come with a chain of custody. Four humans. Trained photographers. Proven equipment. Mission records. These images are not just beautiful. They are authenticated.

In a world drowning in synthetic imagery, authenticity is becoming the rarest and most valuable thing a photograph can offer. Not technical perfection. The proof that a human being was there, that they looked, that they chose this frame, that they pressed the shutter in the presence of something real.

That is what NASA flew to the Moon to do. That is what you do every time you pick up your camera and capture the world as only you can see it.

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To the public, nothing outshines the glamour of Hollywood like a good red carpet. The dresses, the jewels, the luxury, and the iconic flash flash flash of hundreds of images being taken so every detail can be poured over for days or weeks to come.

However, if you’ve ever been on the other side of that carpet, elbow to elbow with a dozen or more other photographers all trying to get as many good shots as possible in the short window they have with each celebrity, you know there is truly nothing less glamorous.

This is a promotion assembly line, and it’s sink or swim to earn your photo pass year after year. Everyone’s stressed, everyone’s trying to get the best shot, and this has led to an environment on many carpets that’s well…less than calm and collected.

This dynamic was suddenly thrust into the spotlight at the 2024 VMAs when rising star Chappell Roan got into a heated argument with a photographer on the red carpet after allegedly missing her photo mark.

This argument quickly went viral, and sparked an online debate about the relationship between celebrities and photographers and the kind of treatment each should expect to receive.

With Chappell once again trending for her interactions with paparazzi at Paris fashion week, I think it’s a good time to deep dive into the relationship between celebrities, photographers, and the industry of images that surround them both, and ask the question “can we all do better? And if so, how?”

Creating a Culture of Respect

I don’t think it’s a wild argument to make that at the end of the day, in any line of work, respect should be the baseline for interaction between people.

Whether you’re tired, hungry, stressed, time-pressured, or plain grumpy, you should always seek to interact with others in a way that shows them you respect the work they’re doing, and they in turn should give the same to you.

What Chappell Roan and many other celebrities have pushed back on across the decades has been interactions with photographers that haven’t maintained that baseline level of respect.

Around the same time as Chappell Roan’s VMA confrontation, a video of Anne Hathaway from 2022 resurfaced where she’s seen attempting to “calm” a swarm of fans and photographers in Italy by repeating “Calma! Calma!” in an almost mother-like tone.

What this video really highlights is that many celebrities understand the desire/need for photographs of them, but are frustrated with the chaos that often comes with getting them.

Whether it’s shooting in a studio, on a red carpet, or yes, even grabbing candid shots on the street, I believe photographers have a duty to treat their subjects with respect and dignity, and respect their space, autonomy, and boundaries, even if it means not getting the “perfect” shot.

“But Karen, this is just how things are done! If I don’t fight for the shot, someone else will!” you might be thinking.

Well, here’s a great example from veteran event photographer Steven Lovekin on how he gets great shots of Beyoncé, Zoe Saldana, Kristen Stewart and more without contributing to the chaos.

“I don’t love the traditional yelling that many photographers belt out to get the attention of an actor. I remember one time I was trying out another method, using a blinking light that I sometimes attach to my gear. Daniel Radcliffe noticed the light and came closer to explore. We wound up talking for a little bit before he gave me the poses I wanted. It was a nice, real moment for me amid the frenzy of a high-pressure event.”

This kind of thoughtful innovation in the name of baseline respect and decency is exactly what I envision when I think of a more respectful relationship between photographers and their subjects.

Working Together Vs. Against

At its core, photography involves a photographer and a subject “opposing” each other, at least physically. But great photography usually happens when the photographer and subject work in collaboration to create the final image.

This is most obvious in a studio setting, but there’s tons of collaboration happening on carpets and at events too.

Celebs are doing their best to offer flattering poses to as many lenses as possible, and photographers are clamoring to get the best angle.

And this is where a lot of the tension boils. Time is limited, elbows are flying, and when everyone is shouting and jostling, it’s hard to communicate not only photographer-to-celebrity but photographer-to-photographer. And once the noise and tension has built, it’s hard to notch it back down.

The real solution to this is for everyone to step into these environments not with an energy of competition and confrontation, but one of collaboration.

A calmer environment between photographers leads to a calmer environment for subjects to step into. A calmer environment for them to work in leads to better poses, more natural expressions, longer sessions with each person, and overall, better photos.

Everyone wins.

After Chappell’s confrontation with the photographer at the VMAs, there has been a significant shift in the vibe on red carpets. So significant, multiple celebrities have commented on it, including Michael B. Jordan, who on the 2026 Academy Awards red carpet joked to the photo pit “It’s too quiet. It’s throwing me off.” Sabrina Carpenter also made similar remarks during the Grammy awards red carpet.

This all goes to show that it’s absolutely possible to shift toxic cultural norms by remembering that people’s relationships and experiences with us as photographers matter as much as the product, and that respect, communication, and collaboration should be the standard in all workplaces, including and especially the creative ones.

Want more insights on the intersection of photography, art, and culture? Check out these articles…

Because even if you didn’t understand a single lyric, you understood the world.

This show was built like a short film: a spatial narrative that moved through home, history, diaspora, protest, and celebration, using objects, textures and people that didn’t require translation. It was staged as a version of Puerto Rico you could walk through:

sugarcane, jíbaro farmers, a house party, street vendors, domino tables, plastic chairs, a New York block, and finally a sweep of flags that reframed “America” as a hemisphere, not a border.

Below is a breakdown of the major visual motifs he and his team created, and how they carried the message past language and straight into the hearts and minds of millions.

1) The opening image: a living landscape of “home,” built out of people

The show opened with a field: lush, dense, and quite literally alive.

Bad Bunny walked through sugarcane and tropical foliage, surrounded by jíbaros in traditional white clothing and straw pava hats, carrying machetes.

This immediately did three things for viewers:

• Located the story geographically (Puerto Rico, not a generic “Latin vibe”)

• Located it economically (agriculture, labor, land)

• Located it historically (the beauty of the island, and the weight of colonial extraction)

And then the production trick lands: much of that “foliage” was actually human choreography. Because the field couldn’t be fully built with wheeled scenic carts on the stadium turf, the production used roughly 380 performers dressed as tall grass, sugarcane, and plants. turning the environment into a moving chorus.

Being able to take the expanse of the stadium and create a focused, immersive space for the camera and Bad Bunny to weave through was a truly genius move by the team. It created incredible texture and intimacy that draws you into the story that he was about to tell to an audience where a large chunk of people watching won’t be able to understand anything he’s saying.

2) The “everyday vignettes”

A lot of halftime shows rely on abstraction: lights, platforms, dancers, pyro. This one did something sneakier: it staged small, specific moments. Moments that are instantly recognizable to almost anyone who was watching, but carried deeper meaning and significance for his Latin American audience.

Across the stage, the set included vignettes of everyday Puerto Rican life:

• a piragua (shaved ice) stand/cart

• a makeshift nail salon

• older men playing dominoes

• people building with cinderblocks

• street vendors

• A kid asleep at a wedding

These choices are powerful because they refuse the tourist gaze. They don’t say “look at our exotic culture.” They say: this is Tuesday, this is what it looks like, this is what it feels like. And that’s exactly how you build resonance across language: you anchor the specific in the universal.

Everybody understands:

• friends gathered around a game

• women laughing in a salon

• someone selling something cold on a hot day

• neighbors building and fixing what they can

3) The Pink Casita

At the center of the stage sat the “pink casita,” an iconic house structure that Bad Bunny has deployed during his recent tour. Modeled after a real home in Humacao and recreated for the halftime show, it carried a powerful visual message: Home is not a place you left behind. Home is something you carry into the world and fill with the people you care about.

Inside/around this casita, the performance played like a marquesina gathering (the house-party social life that’s foundational in Puerto Rican culture). The set positioned celebrity onlookers inside it, turning the house into a literal viewing room: a party watching a party.

Even without knowing that word, viewers understood the visual: people together, music loud, the house holding everyone.

If the show had one “untranslated” line, it was this: we are our people, and we make home wherever we gather.

4) Ordinary objects and moments that evoke specific memories

One of the smartest moves was using objects that are almost aggressively non-glamorous.

White plastic monobloc chairs (the ubiquitous backyard/porch chairs) appeared as a recurring motif. These chairs

They instantly evoke:

• a cousin’s birthday party

• a neighbor’s porch

• an auntie’s backyard

• a late-night conversation after everyone else went inside

These cheap plastic chairs are not just a staple of Puerto Rican culture, but of millions of people across the globe. There is something about them that just screams “home,” whether that home is in the Caribbean or a backyard in California.

6) Protest imagery: “El Apagón”

Mid-show, the visuals sharpened into political metaphor—most notably during “El Apagón,” a song associated with Puerto Rico’s ongoing power-grid failures and wider structural critique.

The performance staged dancers on (or dangling from) short-circuiting utility/telephone : poles sparking/exploding to represent blackouts and fragile infrastructure that plagues Puerto Rico in the modern day.

And then: the flag.

Bad Bunny carried a Puerto Rican flag featuring a light blue triangle—a shade tied to the independence movement (a historically specific reference dating back to the 1890s).

So this sequence does two things. It carries overt and covert visual imagery, some of which is designed to be clearly understood by those outside the culture, and some that is a quiet nod to those inside it, not intended for mass understanding.

7) The finale: “America” reframed as a shared hemisphere

In the closing sequence, Bad Bunny delivered an English “God Bless America,” then was flanked by flags from across North, Central, and South America—paired with a football that read “Together, We Are America,” plus a closing message emphasizing love over hate.

Visually, this did a strategic final move: it took the largest “American” stage and widened the frame.

Not “America” as one country.

America as a shared geography, a shared humanity, made richer by our diverse cultures and languages.

Even if you didn’t understand a single lyric from Bad Bunny’s set, you went on a visual journey through the history and culture of Puerto Rico, it’s people, and their desire to bring their love, community, and families with them wherever they go.

Through immersive camera movement, viewers were literally led through this journey like an invited guest, adding to the intimacy of this visual experience.

A show that could have felt alienating to so many people due to a simple language barrier was able to bring people together in a way few halftime shows have.

And that’s the power of great visual storytelling.

In his 2015 Atlantic essay A World Without Work, Derek Thompson laid bare a long-term trend that went far beyond the tech industry’s promise of disruption: the very idea of stable, middle-class employment is eroding as automation, globalization, and economic restructuring reshape labor markets.

Now, in 2026, many workers are living through these predictions made real. The economic “middle class” of America is shrinking as employment becomes less stable, AI continues to rise, and wages continue to stagnate against an affordability crisis.

What’s striking is that this shift didn’t just hit traditional corporate work. It has also shaken what used to be considered the “creative middle class”: a cohort of skilled artists, writers, designers, and visual storytellers who once could reasonably expect to build sustainable careers bridging independent work and institutional support.

As creative budgets shrink and in-house opportunities become rarer and lower-paid, many creatives are hitting a crisis point, with the old structures of sustainability no longer affording them enough to buy a home, raise a family, or save for retirement.

So, is the future one where it’s “all or nothing” for artists? Either you starve, or you hit the career lottery to disproportionate fame and fortune?

Some would say absolutely, but I think that ignores a plethora of opportunities that have emerged that are actually fueling a more sustainable future for the average creative, if they know how to capture them.

The Old Models are Crumbling

Historically, if you wanted to be a solid “middle class” artist, you relied on a few tried-and-true sources of income:

High-paying independent client work

Stable in-house creative positions or teaching

Artistic grants for creative development

Most of these were in healthy-enough supply that as long as you put your head down and developed your skillset and network properly, you could carve out a decently stable income.

However, in the current economic climate, that’s simply not the case anymore.

Artistic grants have been slashed. In-house positions are rapidly being replaced with freelancers, and the budget for everything has gone down, putting downward pressure on creative labor rates across the board.

The market has more creatives battling for less opportunities, and it’s creating an “all or nothing” mentality among artists who want to make their way through the traditional paths to success.

But too many creatives are ignoring new opportunities that turn old models on their head and have the potential to create more space for creatives who want to build a sustainable, long-term career without sacrificing their passions.

The New Creative Economy

What modern creatives have access to that has never before existed in the creative economy is a $250 billion behemoth that has completely upended the marketing industry. The “creator economy” has reshaped not just how brands connect with their customers, but how independent creatives can carve out a livelihood for themselves without going through traditional gatekeepers.

This means that not only do artists of all shapes and sizes have the ability to market themselves directly to clients in a wide variety of ways for very little cost, they also have the ability to earn additional income outside of traditional client bookings.

From subscription services to online workshops to brand partnerships, the creator economy offers the most diverse and equitable source of opportunities for the creative community, far outpacing anything offered in the “old model” of building sustainable incomes.

How You Can Harness the New Creative Economy and Thrive

Survival in this new creative economy requires reframing how photographers think about their careers: from hustle to strategic positioning.

1. Build diversified income streams

Relying solely on client commissions is increasingly risky. Consider teaching, licensing archives, consulting, workshops, limited-edition prints, or recurring revenue models to stabilize income.

2. Specialize and define your niche

Broad generalism competes with the global crowd, but a strong passion for your particular flavor of creativity not only reduces competition but also helps you stand out from the other creatives out there and find other like-minded collaborators.

3. Embrace adaptability — without losing agency

Technology like AI is both a threat and an opportunity. Tools can automate routine tasks, but they cannot replace human judgment, context, and creative vision. Creatives who understand how to integrate new tools into their workflow — without ceding creative control — will have a competitive edge in an economy where the expected speed of output will continue to increase.

The Future Belongs to the Forward-Thinkers

The creative middle class is dying—at least the version that depended on a handful of institutions to reliably pay fair rates, offer stability, and validate your work as “real.” But that doesn’t mean the only alternative is lottery-winner fame or slow starvation. It means the center of gravity has moved. The new middle is being rebuilt in smaller, more modular ways: a patchwork of recurring revenue, direct audiences, smart partnerships, and skills that travel across industries without diluting your voice. The creatives who will feel “safe” again aren’t necessarily the loudest—they’re the ones who design resilience on purpose.

So maybe the better question isn’t whether we’re losing a middle class, but what we’re replacing it with: a golden age for artists who are willing to treat their creativity like an ecosystem instead of a single paycheck. The gatekeepers still exist, but they’re no longer the only doors. If you can define your niche, build a few durable income channels, and use new tools without surrendering your taste, you have a better chance than ever to make a living doing what you love.

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For decades, the photo industry fed us one version of “professional” images: crisp lighting, perfectly graded skin, and a slick “magazine ready” polish to every frame. But Gen Z? They’ve decided that kind of perfection is boring. Even more so, perfection is suspicious. 

Gen Z is a generation of creatives that is coming of age during the peak of the AI image revolution, and who are all too familiar with image manipulation tools like FaceTune that have been clearing their peers of acne and other imperfections with a click of a button since middle school.

This is a generation that has been fed nothing but “perfection” in the images they consume, while culturally, they face a far messier reality. 

So how are they coping with all this? Well, there are some radical shifts in the kind of photography that Gen Z is both creating and consuming, and it’s rewriting everything we know about what makes a “good” image. 

Defining the Gen Z Aesthetic

So what exactly is the “Gen Z aesthetic” in photography? Unlike the “Pinterest perfect” aesthetics embraced by millennials, Gen Z is embracing images that prioritize the feeling of an image over its technical “perfection.” 

This means embracing images that have technical “flaws” like lens blur, over-exposed flash, visible film grain, or even out-of-focus subjects, as long as the image feels dynamic. 

There’s also a heavy preference towards film emulation, recreating the lo-fi aesthetics of everything from old SLRs to early 2000s point-and-shoots.

In a few words, Gen Z aesthetic is defined by “intentional imperfection.” 

Imperfections have become proof of humanity, and in an era where AI already imitates us too well, humanity is premium currency.

That’s why film photography’s resurgence among Gen Z isn’t just a coincidence or trend cycle. The draw of shooting on film is its unpredictability. With film, there are always uncontrollable variables that guarantee your photo won’t look like anyone else’s. And in a marketplace drowning in sameness, accidents become advantageous.

Story Over Slick Edits

While it’s easy to slap some grain over an image and boost some highlights to get that retro film look, that’s not the core of what makes Gen Z photography so compelling. 

This is a generation that’s been asked to brand themselves, to be the narrators of their own story, since they were old enough to create a social media account (which for many, was probably younger than they should have been). And as such, they’re remarkably deft storytellers, both of their own narratives and the ones they’re crafting through their work. 

There’s an energy that bleeds through their work, a kind of clawing desire to buck the established perfectionism that’s been shoved down their throats and capture something that feels more real, more raw. 

Feels is also a key word, because this is also a generation that in many ways has been robbed of some of the most key years for building their communities and experiencing some of the most visceral parts of coming-of-age. 

Could Gen Z’s obsession with a retro aesthetic also be a craving for the world that those cameras lived in? A world where you weren’t under constant surveillance, where house parties were regular occurrences, where you didn’t connect with your friends through a screen?

Either way, it’s led to a rise in photographic storytelling that feels more like it’s happening in the intimacy of a fleeting moment between photographer and subject than in a slick studio setup. 

The New Market for Authenticity 

Here’s where things get messy.

Every brand who wants to market to Gen Z is trying to capture this “authenticity” that the generation craves, but very few want the vulnerability, experimentation, and risk that come with it. They want the look of authenticity without the truth of it.

They hire young photographers for their edge, then drown them in approval cycles, legal notes, and brand guidelines. They say “be yourself,” then hand over a mood board of work the photographer didn’t make.

It’s leading to a lot of half-baked campaigns that get mercilessly mocked on Reddit. 

Because what brands are failing to recognize is that Gen Z is slowly detaching from slick, one-off campaigns and are allying themselves with brands and photographers who build a consistent, honest narrative over time. That means including them in not just the product, but the process. 

This is the critical thing for both photographers and brands to understand about this audience:

Process is the one thing that can’t be faked. 

And that’s why in a marketplace flooded with fakes, the more transparent someone is about their process, the more people will cling onto them. 

So, What Does This Mean for Working Photographers?

A lot, especially if you didn’t grow up posting your entire adolescence on the internet.

This is a seismic shift in working for many established photographers. Not only do a lot of photographers who have worked hard to perfect the art of the flawless edit feel overlooked as preferred brand aesthetics shift, but the demand that you let people into your process can feel overwhelming if you’re not a natural “look at me!” person (hey, there’s a reason so many of us chose this side of the lens). 

I think it’s important that we look at this shift as an opportunity to integrate some key truths into our work, versus feel like we need to upend our entire style and process:

1. Emotion beats execution.

Viewers care less about sharpness and more about sincerity. If your image makes someone feel something, you’ve already won, no matter what aesthetic style you’ve chosen. 

2. Imperfection is valuable.

The accidents are often where the story lives. Over-polishing can sterilize the soul out of your work. Try sharing more outtakes, more of the frames you wish the client had picked, or more BTS content that shows what makes *your* sets unique. 

3. Identity matters.

The strongest images today aren’t universal, they’re personal. People want to see your perspective, not the “correct” one. Invite yourself to have a strong point of view in your work, not to replicate what everyone else is doing. 

4. Technical mastery isn’t the end goal.

Your technical abilities are now more than ever judged not just on individual mastery of techniques, but in how you use those techniques to serve the story you’re telling. So stop waiting to be perfect at all the technical elements and instead focus on using the skills you already have to tell better stories. 

5. Authenticity isn’t an aesthetic, it’s a relationship.

Your community is part of your art now. How you show up and share your work matters as much as what you create. 

We are entering an era where technical prowess can be copied by machines, but the heart and soul of photography can’t. And that’s what Gen Z is teaching us all to lean into. Throw out the belief that our gear defines our worth in this industry, and lean into the greatest value we have as humans: our unique perspective and desire to connect with each other. 

Plus, who doesn’t love that film is back, baby? 

Open any image feed online right now and it’s a chaos mash-up of images: a moody self-portrait shot on Portra 400, a crisp iPhone snap of someone’s lunch, a “photo” of a woman with 13 fingers in an impossible sunset, and a brand’s campaign image that might be real, might be AI, and no one’s fully sure.

For photographers, it can feel like the ground is shifting under our feet in a way most of us have never experienced. If photorealistic images can be generated in seconds without a camera, are photographers on the verge of extinction? And will “photography” as we know it survive the availability of fast, cheap AI knockoffs that can replicate our framing, lighting, and overall aesthetic?

The short answer? Yes, I believe it will. But the value and role of photography as we know it is changing, and photographers have an opportunity (and maybe a responsibility) to shape that change.

Photography has always been faked

Part of what feels so destabilizing about AI is the sense that it’s new. But image manipulation has been part of photography from the beginning.

Darkroom dodging and burning, retouching negatives, composite prints, war photos cropped to shape a narrative, since we invented the photograph, we’ve invented ways to change them after they’ve been shot.

In the 1990s, when Photoshop became widely available, edits that used to be considered “deception” were rebranded as standard enhancement. The photograph has shifted from being treated as an authoritative record to a kind of “first draft,” raw material to be modified.

As Fred Ritchin writes in Vanity Fair, digital photography and software have turned the “message” of photography toward the malleability of the real, not its faithful recording. AI didn’t invent this method, but it has supercharged it.

The Aperture essay “How Will AI Transform Photography?” points out that even before the current wave of text-to-image generators, artists were using earlier AI models like GANs to remix their own archives and produce composite imagery. In other words: the border between “straight” photography and computation has been porous for a while, especially in experimental photography.

What actually changes with AI?

What is new is that, for the first time, we have images that look like photographs but have no optical connection to reality at all.

Generative AI models are trained on billions of scraped images and their text tags, then spit out “photographs” of events, people, and places that never existed.

These outputs are already:

• Being sold alongside real photos on major stock platforms

• Winning or at least entering photography competitions

• Circulating in news, marketing, and social feeds where many viewers can’t tell (or don’t care) if they’re synthetic

That’s the core anxiety in the New York Times op-ed, “A.I. Is the Future of Photography. Does That Mean Photography Is Dead?” Our fear is not simply that AI exists, but that we’re tempted to collapse all lens-based and synthetic imagery under one word: photograph, with no separation of cultural value between the two.

If “photos” imagined by a trained algorithm become indistinguishable from ones created by light hitting a sensor at a real place and time, what happens to trust? To evidence? To the history of photography as a way of witnessing the world around us?

AI as a tool vs. AI as a medium

It helps to separate two very different uses of AI:

1. AI as a tool inside photographic practice

   • Noise reduction and sharpening

   • Subject selection and masking

   • Generative fill to remove a trash can or extend a backdrop

   • Culling and auto-keywording thousands of RAW files

This is already everywhere, from Lightroom and Photoshop to your phone’s portrait mode. These tools change workflow and aesthetics, but the image still begins with a moment in front of a lens.

2. AI as primary imaging medium

   • DALL·E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, etc.

   • “Photographs” made from text prompts, with no shoot, no subject, no shutter

Here, we’re arguably not talking about photography anymore. We’re talking about a cousin of illustration and CGI that borrows photography’s look.

The Aperture piece highlights how some artists are leaning into AI as an experimental medium. Laurie Simmons uses DALL·E to extend her long-running feminist domestic tableaux, and Charlie Engman uses Midjourney to warp bodies into surreal contortions he would never ethically ask of a real model.

At the same time, Minne Atairu’s work exposes how these systems reproduce racial stereotypes and gaps because they’re trained on biased data. Her attempts to depict Black identities or naturally blond Melanesians reveal the model’s blind spots more than its imagination.

So yes, AI is a creative playground, but it’s also a mirror held up to the inequalities baked into the visual culture it’s trained on.

Computational photography already broke the “decisive moment”

Another under-discussed shift: your smartphone has quietly rewritten what a “photo” even is.

Ritchin notes that many phone cameras now composite multiple frames (up to 15 in some HDR systems) into a single image that looks like a single click of the shutter but is actually many moments fused together. Software chooses the “best” expressions, brightens shadows, deepens skies, smooths skin. Tools like Google’s Magic Editor let you move people in the frame or swap a gray sky for a perfect sunset.

If Henri Cartier-Bresson once defined photography as capturing a decisive moment, smartphones have turned that into a curated pseudo-moment, assembled by algorithms designed to make you happy.

AI-driven editing is already baked into everyday images. That’s important context for talking about “AI vs photography,” because the line has been blurry for a while.

Why live capture still matters

So if everything is flexible and synthetic, why insist on the importance of “real” photographs at all?

Because photography isn’t just about the aesthetic. It’s about attention, relationship, and risk.

When you walk into a protest with a camera, there’s risk: political, physical, emotional. When you photograph a family, there’s a relationship: trust, vulnerability, the negotiation of how someone wants to be seen. When you make a portrait, you’re working with a specific body in a specific light, with all the awkwardness and surprise that entails.

Generative AI can simulate the look of these situations, but it doesn’t endure the risk or earn the trust. It isn’t accountable to communities. The Aperture article points out that AI systems struggle to capture the subtle, embodied gestures that convey emotion in real bodies; they understand “happy” as a tagged smile, not as shoulders relaxing after bad news or a quiet look between people who share a history.

For communities historically misrepresented or erased from visual history, such as black communities, queer communities, and marginalized neighborhoods, the stakes are even higher. AI models trained on existing images will, by default, reproduce old stereotypes and absences unless someone intervenes.

Live photography, especially when created by artists from within those communities, is still one of the most powerful ways to counter that bias, to insist on subjects being seen on their own terms, in their own environment.

The flood of “AI slop” makes the real more precious

Another way to frame it: AI doesn’t erase the value of real photographs; it changes what we value about them.

If synthetic images become cheap, infinite, and frictionless, then what rises in value is:

• Verifiable context – who made this, where, when, and why?

• Process – behind-the-scenes, contact sheets, outtakes, stories from the shoot

• Subjectivity – a particular way of seeing, not generic, mash-up aesthetics

• Trust – a photographer’s reputation with their community or audience

Ritchin notes that with billions of images produced daily, individual pictures already risk losing significance. AI will only accelerate that. But just as vinyl found a place in the age of streaming and film photography resurged in a digital world, camera-based photography can become more intentional, more artisanal, more clearly anchored in lived experience.

The word “photograph” might stretch. It might even bifurcate into new categories: camera-native vs synthetic, lens-based vs model-generated. But the human hunger for witnessing, for knowing that someone stood there and saw this, doesn’t vanish.

How working photographers can approach AI (without losing the plot)

For photographers, the question isn’t “AI: yes or no?” It’s how and where to use it.

A few practical principles:

1. Use AI as an assistant, not the author
   Let AI help with culling, denoising, keywording, or subtle clean-up. Treat generative tools like you’d treat a heavy retouch: in service of a real moment, not a replacement for it.

2. Be transparent about synthetic elements
   If you’re using significant generative fill or AI-composited elements, say so. In your captions, in your client communication, in contest submissions. The Aperture article stresses the importance of understanding the systems’ limitations and biases; part of that is being honest about when they’re in the room.

3. Lean into process storytelling
   Show your contact sheets, your location scouts, your messy studio. In an era where any “perfect” image could be AI, audiences are increasingly drawn to proof of process and the imperfect edges that signal human making.

4. Guard your archive and your name
   As artists sue companies like Stability AI and Getty over unauthorized scraping, copyright, and consent issues around training data are live. Pay attention to how your work is used, and align with organizations pushing for fairer policies.

5. Double down on what AI is bad at
   Long-term projects. Deep familiarity with a community. Slow, awkward intimacy. The idiosyncratic, the politically inconvenient, the unglamorous everyday. Those are still hard to fake convincingly, and they’re where photography has always been strongest.

So… will photography survive?

AI is not an extinction-level meteor crashing into photography. It’s more like a climate shift.

Stock shooters will feel the impact first; generic, “could be anywhere” imagery is exactly what AI is good at. But for photographers who are building distinct voices, genuine relationships, and bodies of work grounded in lived experience, AI becomes another environmental factor to navigate, not the death of the craft.

Photography survives if we remember that it was never just about the image file. It’s about the act of pointing a camera at the world, of saying: this mattered, right here, right now, to me and to the people in front of my lens.

AI can fabricate scenes, remix aesthetics, and challenge our assumptions about truth in images. It might even push us toward a healthier skepticism of all visual media.

But it can’t stand in a storm with you. It can’t gain a subject’s trust over the years. It can’t understand the specific weight of a look between two people who haven’t seen each other in a decade.

That’s still your job.

And as the synthetic flood rises, that job only becomes more necessary.

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She’s made a brand out of playing with taboo. Her lyrics make liberal use of innuendo and double entendras. Her shows are theatrical, often punctuated by Sabrina demonstrating a new sex position each night during “Juno.”

So when she dropped the album cover for Man’s Best Friend—posing on all fours, her hair tugged like a leash by an unseen male hand—it didn’t exactly feel out of character. Provocative? Sure. But shocking? Not really.

And yet, the internet lost its mind.

• It’s too sexual.
  
  

• It’s degrading to women.
  
  

• It’s setting feminism back decades.
  
  

• And, predictably: “What about the children??”
  
  

The backlash didn’t just come from more conservative critics. Plenty of feminists joined the pile-on, too. And in the swirl of discourse, one academic term migrated from feminist theory seminars to TikTok threads and Instagram comment sections: the male gaze.

The central question became: Is Sabrina catering to men’s fantasies? And if so, is she undoing decades of feminist work to reclaim women’s bodies and images?

Personally, I think the debate reveals something much deeper: the politics of women’s images—how, when, and why women depict themselves—are in constant flux, and almost never in ways that give women full cultural permission to depict themselves how they want to.

First things first: What is the “male gaze”?

The term comes from Laura Mulvey’s seminal 1973 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Mulvey argued that mainstream cinema—where men directed virtually all films—depicted women primarily as passive, hyper-sexualized objects of visual pleasure.

The camera wasn’t neutral; it was an extension of the male creator’s worldview. Women were positioned to be looked at, not to look. Desire flowed one way.

At the time of Mulvey’s writing, women directed just 0.19% of feature films. So the “gaze” wasn’t just metaphorical. It was structural: Who held the camera determined who held power over representation.

Fast-forward to 2025. The term “male gaze” is tossed around more broadly, often as shorthand for any media that seems to cater to heteronormative male desire or uphold patriarchal norms. But at its core, it’s still about authorship and control: Who decides how women are seen?

From object to subject: how women are reclaiming their own image

Historically, women’s bodies—often fragmented, faceless, and hyper-sexualized—were plastered across album covers to sell music made by men for men. Sometimes the women weren’t even full figures—just a leg, a breast, or a torso. The purpose was blunt: objectify women to signal desirability and dominance.

In these images, women had zero agency. Put bluntly, they were props. Props that often didn’t have any connection to the work they were being used to promote besides “Wow, look at her. We got her to pose for our cover.”

Sabrina’s cover, by contrast, centers her as the artist and the subject of the commentary. She’s not a faceless torso; she’s the creator. And the image—a tongue-in-cheek riff on the album title—isn’t divorced from the work. It’s part of the narrative she’s building.

So why does this still make people furious?

She who controls the image, controls the world

Sure, some of the outrage can be attributed to the modern state of the internet—reactions travel faster, outrage is currency. But there’s something deeper at play:

After decades of women being sexualized against their will, will society accept women taking an active role in depicting their own sexuality?

Even when a woman controls the camera, the concept, the context, the same old critiques resurface: degrading, attention-seeking, bad for feminism.

This isn’t new. Madonna was crucified for her Like a Prayer video in 1989. Miley Cyrus was lambasted for Bangerz in 2013. Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion ignited moral panic with WAP in 2020.

Each time, the same cultural fault line cracks open: when women push boundaries of sexual self-representation, even in full creative control, society scrambles to police them from all sides.

What this really tells us

The uproar over Sabrina’s album cover isn’t about taste or even feminism—it’s about our unresolved discomfort with women’s autonomy over their own image. We claim to want agency, empowerment, and choice for women, but the moment that choice takes a form we don’t like, the same old moral panic floods in.

And that’s the point: this isn’t just about Sabrina Carpenter. It’s about how, even in 2025, women are fighting an uphill battle for the freedom to be seen the way we want to be seen, whether it's on an album cover, in a blockbuster movie, or even on our own personal social media.

So as creatives and image creators, what do we do with this knowledge?

How to navigate this as a creative

The number one thing we always need to keep in mind as creatives is this: you have no control over the whims of public critique.

What people love one day, they’ll hate the next. What one generation believes to be value-less trash the next generation will uphold as artistic genius.

It’s important to not listen to the court of public opinion when creating the art that we want to create, as long as we are creating it with authenticity and respect for our subjects.

Now, if you want to be mindful to the intersectional identities of your subjects and the way certain bodies will be policed more than others in an image, here are some things you can keep in mind when planning and executing your projects:

• Consult with people who share the identities you plan to represent and get feedback from them on potential stereotypes or other representational issues you may unintentionally be upholding in your creative plan
  
  

• Invite feedback and collaboration from your subjects about how they would like to be portrayed
  
  

• Include a diversity of identities in your creative team and create a culture that welcomes feedback or flagging of potential issues during a shoot

You can’t control the public narrative, but you can make active strides towards creating art that respects the individuality and authenticity of your subjects and doesn’t just rely on stereotypes or objectification to create an image that’s captivating and conversation-starting.

Bonus: Sabrina’s response

Sabrina, predictably, has taken the whole controversy in stride, clapping back at critics on X and in social media comment sections.

In direct response to the album cover image, she later released an alternate album cover she said was “approved by God,” still featuring her clinging to an unnamed man but this time standing up.

So what do you think, was this Sabrina caving to the pressure of public opinion, or a cheeky reflection on the moral panic? (The original album cover is still featured on Spotify and all other major music distributors)

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