Episode 25: AI in Documentary Photography

Tom Warland and Tobias Beach-Wyld examine how AI is being used within documentary and photographic practice, asking whether it can support storytelling without pretending to be traditional photography.

Looking at work by Magnum photographers including Carl De Keyzer, Philip Toledano and Jonas Bendiksen, they discuss where AI becomes a creative tool, a form of collage, or perhaps an entirely new visual language.

Rather than approaching AI through moral panic, the conversation considers what happens when photographers use it critically: to construct alternate realities, explore events that cannot be photographed, question the reliability of images, and challenge our ideas of photographic truth.

• Tom and Tobias frame AI as a creative tool rather than simply a threat to photography.
• Magnum Photos, documentary tradition, and the tension between human-made photographic archives and AI-generated imagery.
• Carl De Keyzer’s Putin’s Dream and using AI to depict a reality that cannot be photographed directly.
• Is AI image-making closer to photomontage, collage, constructed fiction, or photography?
• How AI storytelling relates to poetry, propaganda, and assembling meaning from fragments.
• Philip Toledano’s Another America and AI as a way of constructing a convincing alternate reality, rather than simply imitating the existing world.
• Jonas Bendiksen and questions around photographic truth, authorship, and our willingness to believe images.
• How bias, race, and existing media representation can influence AI-generated imagery.
• Why AI doesn't necessarily replace photography, but may instead create something adjacent to it.
• Can AI become a genuine creative collaborator rather than simply an automation tool?

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