Connecticut Public’s Visuals Team traveled across the state this year to bring visual storytelling to our news coverage. Our visual journalists work in both stills and motion, and are tasked with telling stories for the eyes and ears.

We were present during times of heartache and loss, and at times of joy and celebration. We were at the shoreline, in cities and suburbs, at colleges and games, at press conferences and speeches, and at strikes and festivals. Where life is happening we strive to connect our audience deeper to the community we serve.

Thanks for taking a look, and we hope you find the work of the past year from Tyler Russell, Ryan Caron King, Dave Wurtzel, Mark Mirko, Julianne Varacchi, Ayannah Brown, Joe Buglewicz and Joe Amon informative and inspiring.

Photography, once defined by John Szarkowski, a former curator of the Museum of Modern Art, as the act of capturing a visual perspective from the physical world, is undergoing a paradigm shift. A new wave of generative AI tools, capable of creating photorealistic images without direct capture from the real world, is challenging traditional definitions and norms. These AI-generated images not only find home at stock agencies for purchase but also go viral online, and have even clinched photo prizes, igniting a debate about what truly constitutes a photograph.

AI and the Changing Face of Photography

The microchip manufacturer MU is investing heavily in generative AI, acknowledging its transformative potential across industries. Meanwhile, StarryNift, a blockchain-based company, has introduced an innovative framework that addresses tokenomics design. This revolution in creative expression democratizes art and creativity, as anyone can now generate art and innovate in various fields such as literature, music, cinema, and culinary arts. The implications for education, access, and ethical use, are profound, marking a tangible shift in how we perceive and engage with art and learning.

Midjourney 6: The New Age of Digital Image Creation

Midjourney 6 is a groundbreaking evolution of digital image creation. It enhances its proficiency in producing high-resolution in-image text and photorealistic images, expanding the horizons of visual storytelling. This new version is compatible with GPT and DALL-E style prompting and introduces a remarkable enhancement in food texture rendering. Midjourney’s AI image generator allows photographers to explore new horizons in image creation by leveraging artificial intelligence to generate complex images from textual descriptions. This leap forward raises legal questions around copyright and ownership of AI-generated artwork, underlining the importance of registering works to claim statutory damages in case of infringement.

The Ethical and Legal Implications

The US Copyright Office plays a pivotal role in protecting the rights of photographers, making it imperative for them to ensure proper attribution and obtain consent for the use of their photographs to protect their intellectual property rights. As the technology pervades, it inevitably brings issues of authenticity and ethics to the forefront, necessitating the evolution of educational programs and the art form itself. The rise of generative AI might lead to a new understanding of visual media, fostering a more educated skepticism towards images, akin to historical shifts in art such as the reaction to the invention of the daguerreotype.

ORANGEBURG, S.C. (AP) — Much of how South Carolina has seen its civil rights history has been through the lens of photographer Cecil Williams. From sit-ins to prayer protests to portraits of African Americans integrating universities and rising to federal judges, Williams has snapped it.

After years of work, Williams’ millions of photographs are being digitized and categorized and his chief dream of a civil rights museum marking how Black Americans fought segregation and discrimination in the state is about to move out of his old house and into a much bigger, and more prominent, building in Orangeburg.

“Images can be very powerful storytelling,” said Williams, who turned 85 last month. “And the struggle to get the rights we were due under the U.S. Constitution is a very powerful story.”

While Williams’ story and those in his images will be remembered, preservationists and historians worry plenty of African American history is being lost as those who lived during the civil rights era die and their letters, photographs and other mementos of the struggle are tossed out.

“We talk about superheroes like Superman or the Black Panther. But I wish young people would realize there are superheroes in their neighborhoods who fought injustice every day,” Williams said.

Williams got his first camera when he was 9. A few years later he took one picture of civil rights attorney and later Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall getting off a train to work on a segregation case — just one frame because it was dark and flashbulbs were $1 each.

The photo got a lot of attention. Soon, Jet magazine had Williams taking pictures. He kept going for decades, capturing images of the Charleston hospital workers strike, U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond’s last campaign and the Confederate flag being removed from atop the Statehouse dome.

In 2019, Williams, his wife and a friend realized there was no museum focused on civil rights in South Carolina, unlike every other Southern state.

So Williams converted his old house and darkroom in a residential neighborhood in Orangeburg into the Cecil Williams South Carolina Civil Rights Museum. He created the exhibitions and partitioned off the rooms himself. It’s had 25,000 visitors with little marketing.

His photographs are everywhere, but that’s not all. There is a bowling pin and shotgun shells from the All-Star Bowling Lanes where demonstrations to desegregate in 1968 ended with police firing on protestors, killing three of them in what became known as the Orangeburg Massacre.

Close to his heart is the section about Briggs v. Elliott, the South Carolina case that provided the foundation for the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn legal segregation in Brown v. Board of Education.

Williams displays the Bible of the Rev. Joseph DeLaine, one of the plaintiffs in Briggs v. Elliott who organized Black parents to fight their local school district over its grossly unequal schools. There also is DeLaine’s long gun which he used to protect himself and his family when racists came to attack them one night.

Williams’ latest efforts are a longshot attempt to get the U.S. Supreme Court to rename the Brown case the Briggs case in its official records. The Briggs cases landed on the Supreme Court’s docket in 1951; Brown was added a year later. The court has said the name happened when a clerk consolidated five cases against segregation including the Brown and Briggs lawsuits. Williams said he thinks it was intentional to obscure that South Carolina generated the case that killed segregation.

“Sometimes in history, being first matters. And this is one time where it should have mattered,” Williams said.

The negatives containing the history Williams chronicled have been scanned in by Claflin University. Students are working to catalog them with dates and the people in the photographs. But historians worry that’s not the case everywhere as the generation that fought for civil rights dies.

People like historian Brent Leggs aren’t only interested in preserving the houses where civil rights meetings took place and the malt shops where Black people sat at whites-only counters. They want letters, posters, recordings of speeches and sermons, furniture, and anything else that tells the story of what happened, what it looked like, and how it sounded.

“I just believe there is a deep civic well in the Black community. As generations change and change moves through these families, we lose an understanding of the importance of that type of history,” said Leggs, the executive director for the African American Cultural Action Heritage Fund. He urges saving the material and having historians look it over.

In the next year or so, Williams hopes to move his museum into a building three times larger in downtown Orangeburg with full-time staff.

It’s part of a $23 million federal grant to revitalize Railroad Corner in Orangeburg as a gateway to the city that is nearly three-quarters African American with two neighboring historically Black universities. And it’s the culmination of years of trying to get support from anyone who will listen.

“We’re running out of time. I’m running out of time. I have tried for four or five decades to make an impact, to make our history known,” Williams said.

Williams notes almost all the money for the work is coming from federal or local sources.

“South Carolina has long wanted to hide this history,” said Williams. who thinks South Carolina leaders wanted to keep quiet the racism occurring throughout the state.

Williams made sure his museum showed that hidden history. Along with the Briggs case, it remembers Sarah Mae Flemming, an African American woman kicked off a Columbia bus seven months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama.

“Sometimes I put myself into situations where I’m photographing things that became a part of history. But there were other times that it just seems to be my destiny that I arrived at a situation,” Williams said. “I became a poster boy for people who couldn’t speak for themselves.”

At the pinnacle of his career, Williams and his pictures were unwelcome in whites-only South Carolina newsrooms. In Columbia, he was kept from the state’s largest newspaper but allowed in the nearby offices of The Associated Press, which transmitted some of his photos to the world.

“White-owned newspapers in South Carolina did not employ Black reporters or photographers and seldom covered the events of Black people’s lives. Sometimes, thanks to AP distribution, Williams’ work countered this omission,” author Claudia Smith Brinson wrote in Injustice In Focus, a book she wrote with Williams about his life.

ORANGEBURG, S.C. (AP) — Much of how South Carolina has seen its civil rights history has been through the lens of photographer Cecil Williams. From sit-ins to prayer protests to portraits of African Americans integrating universities and rising to federal judges, Williams has snapped it.

After years of work, Williams’ millions of photographs are being digitized and categorized and his chief dream of a civil rights museum marking how Black Americans fought segregation and discrimination in the state is about to move out of his old house and into a much bigger, and more prominent, building in Orangeburg.

“Images can be very powerful storytelling,” said Williams, who turned 85 last month. “And the struggle to get the rights we were due under the U.S. Constitution is a very powerful story.”

While Williams’ story and those in his images will be remembered, preservationists and historians worry plenty of African American history is being lost as those who lived during the civil rights era die and their letters, photographs and other mementos of the struggle are tossed out.

“We talk about superheroes like Superman or the Black Panther. But I wish young people would realize there are superheroes in their neighborhoods who fought injustice every day,” Williams said.

Williams got his first camera when he was 9. A few years later he took one picture of civil rights attorney and later Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall getting off a train to work on a segregation case — just one frame because it was dark and flashbulbs were $1 each.

The photo got a lot of attention. Soon, Jet magazine had Williams taking pictures. He kept going for decades, capturing images of the Charleston hospital workers strike, U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond’s last campaign and the Confederate flag being removed from atop the Statehouse dome.

In 2019, Williams, his wife and a friend realized there was no museum focused on civil rights in South Carolina, unlike every other Southern state.

So Williams converted his old house and darkroom in a residential neighborhood in Orangeburg into the Cecil Williams South Carolina Civil Rights Museum. He created the exhibitions and partitioned off the rooms himself. It’s had 25,000 visitors with little marketing.

His photographs are everywhere, but that’s not all. There is a bowling pin and shotgun shells from the All-Star Bowling Lanes where demonstrations to desegregate in 1968 ended with police firing on protestors, killing three of them in what became known as the Orangeburg Massacre.

Close to his heart is the section about Briggs v. Elliott, the South Carolina case that provided the foundation for the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn legal segregation in Brown v. Board of Education.

Williams displays the Bible of the Rev. Joseph DeLaine, one of the plaintiffs in Briggs v. Elliott who organized Black parents to fight their local school district over its grossly unequal schools. There also is DeLaine’s long gun which he used to protect himself and his family when racists came to attack them one night.

Williams’ latest efforts are a longshot attempt to get the U.S. Supreme Court to rename the Brown case the Briggs case in its official records. The Briggs cases landed on the Supreme Court’s docket in 1951; Brown was added a year later. The court has said the name happened when a clerk consolidated five cases against segregation including the Brown and Briggs lawsuits. Williams said he thinks it was intentional to obscure that South Carolina generated the case that killed segregation.

“Sometimes in history, being first matters. And this is one time where it should have mattered,” Williams said.

The negatives containing the history Williams chronicled have been scanned in by Claflin University. Students are working to catalog them with dates and the people in the photographs. But historians worry that’s not the case everywhere as the generation that fought for civil rights dies.

People like historian Brent Leggs aren’t only interested in preserving the houses where civil rights meetings took place and the malt shops where Black people sat at whites-only counters. They want letters, posters, recordings of speeches and sermons, furniture, and anything else that tells the story of what happened, what it looked like, and how it sounded.

“I just believe there is a deep civic well in the Black community. As generations change and change moves through these families, we lose an understanding of the importance of that type of history,” said Leggs, the executive director for the African American Cultural Action Heritage Fund. He urges saving the material and having historians look it over.

In the next year or so, Williams hopes to move his museum into a building three times larger in downtown Orangeburg with full-time staff.

It’s part of a $23 million federal grant to revitalize Railroad Corner in Orangeburg as a gateway to the city that is nearly three-quarters African American with two neighboring historically Black universities. And it’s the culmination of years of trying to get support from anyone who will listen.

“We’re running out of time. I’m running out of time. I have tried for four or five decades to make an impact, to make our history known,” Williams said.

Williams notes almost all the money for the work is coming from federal or local sources.

“South Carolina has long wanted to hide this history,” said Williams. who thinks South Carolina leaders wanted to keep quiet the racism occurring throughout the state.

Williams made sure his museum showed that hidden history. Along with the Briggs case, it remembers Sarah Mae Flemming, an African American woman kicked off a Columbia bus seven months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama.

“Sometimes I put myself into situations where I’m photographing things that became a part of history. But there were other times that it just seems to be my destiny that I arrived at a situation,” Williams said. “I became a poster boy for people who couldn’t speak for themselves.”

At the pinnacle of his career, Williams and his pictures were unwelcome in whites-only South Carolina newsrooms. In Columbia, he was kept from the state’s largest newspaper but allowed in the nearby offices of The Associated Press, which transmitted some of his photos to the world.

“White-owned newspapers in South Carolina did not employ Black reporters or photographers and seldom covered the events of Black people’s lives. Sometimes, thanks to AP distribution, Williams’ work countered this omission,” author Claudia Smith Brinson wrote in Injustice In Focus, a book she wrote with Williams about his life.