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“I don’t like to shoot photojournalist still photography,” says photographer Bobby Sheehan in an interview with the Phoblographer. “It’s just not my thing. When I do aim a camera at people, I tend to use the camera as an emotional surveillance tool.” He continues to state that what he’s trying to do is possibly reveal what they’re thinking. Some of this is clearly shown in his work, and more will be revealed in the new documentary about Bobby called The Bowery Boy.

All images by Bobby Sheehan. Used with permission.

The Creative Side

Bobby is a New Yorker with a photography portfolio from the 1970s and on. He’s photographed tons of punk rock bands and other musicians. But some of his most fascinating work is his street photography. When you look at it, you’ll see many painterly scenes that simply amaze you. According to him, a huge part of this has to do with Bobby’s adoration of seeking areas entirely ignored by the rest of the world. Whether it’s a crack on the sidewalk with a puddle of water reflecting the sun, a dark alleyway, or some unique perspective on a building, Bobby is creatively into it.

For me, it’s all about shapes and light. And further, without limitations and conventional use of light. Imagine an isolated area that has virtually no light, if you pay more attention, you will find a few foot candles in the farkness, then a whole new world of shadows and light presents itself. It takes a lot more effort to find these sorts of images, it’s a very manual process. You need patience while working to find an image hiding in plain sight.

Bobby Sheehan

Because of this, Bobby finds shooting at night therapeutic. First and foremost, he likes that there are fewer people and distractions. It’s when he feels he can remain still with my lens open without anyone entering the frame. But it’s also led him into curious instances. Sometimes, he’s had to convince muggers to leave him alone. And he once felt scared enough to pack his gear bag and leave when a homeless man accused him of being on his turf, he tells us.

How Bobby Sheehan Got Into Photography

Bobby got into photography a long time ago and has a fascinating story about it. When he was already a professional photographer, a photo of him less than two years of age was discovered in a storage box. “The image is of me posed against a wall holding a knife/shiv with the shadow of a male photographer cast along the wall next to me,” he explains. “I am fairly certain the shadow is my father.” Bobby never knew his father growing up, so he thinks that it caused a lifelong obsession with photography because he wanted to have a relationship with his dad.

Bobby has shot with various cameras over the years. But his first love was the Nikon F and a 50mm f1.4 lens. He used it to photograph for the Village Voice, Soho News and to photograph bands at CBGB’s and many other rock clubs in NYC. He also used the Hasselblad 500CM and an 80mm lens for portraits. Once he had an established portfolio, he got a scholarship to NYU.

From there, he became a fashion photographer and director of fashion and art videos in the early 1980s. His work caught the attention of Andy Warhol, who reached out to him for a collaboration; but it never happened because Warhol passed away before the shoot.

In the late 1980s, Bobby went deeper into photography as part of giving up on drinking and substance abuse. That’s when he bought a 4×5 camera and started photographing in the NYC streets at night. Drawing on inspiration from Dean Chamberlain’s long exposures, he wandered around NYC looking for dark spaces to leave his shutter open. “I would close the aperture down to f45 and because I was using ASA 100 sheet film, my exposures would range from a few minutes to a few hours,” says Bobby. “Although I used a light meter, there was a lot of guesswork in calculating such long-time exposures. For many images, I would go back to the same areas and reshoot plates over and over again until I got the right exposure.” He loved the results. It allowed him to be much more creative than how he worked with his smaller format cameras.

Mix into all this the fact that he’d cross-process his photos to get a super grainy and saturated look.

I would often use slower shutter speeds for impressionist motion blurs; the shapes still register on film but aren’t too transparent. 

Bobby Sheehan

Now here’s where it gets very fascinating! During the daytime, Bobby would use a Nikon 1000mm lens to get extreme closeups of New Yorkers. “I wanted to get close enough with my lens to see into their eyes… sneak peeks into the psyche of the humans walking amongst themselves,” he shares. “All disconnected from each other with their own thoughts circulating inside their heads. Interestingly, there were people who sensed that someone was watching, and they’d spot me across the street with my Nikon F pointed at them.” Sometimes he was spotted, but no one ever said anything to him.

Bobby Sheehan Shares Thoughts on AI Photography

When we look at Bobby’s work, it appears to be what we call unapologetically human. An AI wouldn’t necessarily understand it. So we asked Bobby for his thoughts on what’s happening in the photography world. While acknowledging that young image-makers have a lot of great access, there have been a lot of imposters in things like professional landscape photography. “It’s hard enough for talented photographers to have successful and sustainable careers in an overly crowded workforce,” he states. “So, the idea that artificial intelligence may soon be able to take work away from humans is horrific. There are people saying that it will create new avenues for artists, but I would argue that artificial intelligence could be a creative cancer feeding on its hosts, and we’re the hosts.”

Bobby wouldn’t want a computer creating a soulless image of a loved one. And he’d hate to lose jobs because of it. Further, he thinks it’s also an artistic nightmare. “Personally, I love to feel the hand of the artist on a piece of art,” he shares. “Whether it’s a painting, a piece of music or a  photograph there is a human fingerprint on that art. I’m fine with being viewed as old fashioned because I’d rather be one of the humans not going away without a fight.”

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It’s been a busy month on N-Photo magazine. First, I captured a long exposure of a waterfall before visiting the Cornish coast to capture summer blooms. Then, I photographed the Milky Way core (in the middle of the day) and finished by capturing a blurry image of the Loch Ness monster. And that was all before I photographed a portrait of a person – who doesn’t exist, I might add – and a zebra, riding a unicycle in front of a supermoon… 

If you haven’t already guessed, I didn’t actually photograph any of those increasingly absurd images. Instead, I used an artificial-intelligence image generator: DALL•E 2. This clever browser-based software uses AI to generate images of whatever you type into a search bar. 

• Why not try out the best AI image generators for yourself

Admittedly, it’s not perfect and it struggles to deal with more complicated or abstract requests. However, it’s seemingly appeared out of nowhere and joins a growing list of web-based trends and technologies – such as deepfakes and NFTs – that have the potential to dramatically shift the status quo.

AI is nothing new. Its implementation dates back to the Fifties and today varying forms of AI are used in a variety of industries, including healthcare, cybersecurity and, of course, photography. That’s right, deep-learning AF is AI-driven – and so is Adobe’s proprietary Adobe Sensei. These are all practical and exciting uses of AI, but on the other hand, there’s this whole dystopian idea of AI becoming sentient and inevitably attempting to destroy the world (ahem, The Terminator).

Here’s hoping that a chess computer hellbent on world domination is a little way off yet, but whether or not AI poses a threat to creatives is arguably a different matter. Last September, an AI-generated artwork knowingly won the digital category in the Colorado State Fair’s 2022 Fine Arts competition, which caught plenty of media attention and caused a bit of a ruckus online. And a book published in 2018 called 1 The Road is supposedly the first AI-generated novel ever made.

The question that most interests me, though, is if cheap AI creatives become virtually indistinguishable from human works, where does that leave the creative industry? Photography would surely be affected. And yet, I think it would fare better than many other mediums by its very nature. Most genres of photography revolve around capturing a specific moment in time or a specific person. 

So, we won’t have to say, “Hasta la vista, baby” to proper photography until AIs are given legs. Hopefully…

If you enjoyed this article, you might be interested in reading about the best Nikon Z lenses (opens in new tab) for FX and DX cameras. If you’re clinging to your DSLR you can also check out the best lenses for the Nikon D850 (opens in new tab), and it you’re embracing the revolution then take a look at the best lenses for the Nikon Z50 (opens in new tab).

Kente fabric has been woven on the west coast of Africa for 3,000 years. Traditionally used for the robes of Asante leaders, its vibrant patterns became symbolic of the Ghanaian and pan-African independence movements led by Kwame Nkrumah in the 1950s. The young Ghanaian photographer Derrick Ofosu Boateng weaves many of the associations of that history into his photographs. The man in this picture wears a kente that was part of a recent exhibition at the Amba Gallery in Accra. The background colours borrow the joy of that robe. On his Instagram feed, Boateng comments that: “This smile makes life more beautiful. Glad to share this smile with the world.”

Boateng first used his Instagram account for pictures of himself modelling the traditional and vintage clothing he loved. He realised, however, that people were liking and following him more for his photography than his modelling. He takes his inspiration from the streets and market places outside his door in Accra, and then uses friends to bring his ideas to life. The collaborative process is important, he argues, because western photographers have long come to African cities and taken pictures without the consent of the people in them. News outlets often depicted Ghana and Africa in a negative way, he said in a recent interview with the Homecoming Gallery, and failed to “shine a light on the energy, power, immense creativity and pride that’s also embedded in our culture”.

Boateng sees his pictures – on display with Homecoming gallery at the Photo London fair this week – as part of a creative explosion of Ghanaian culture that includes musicians such as Kelvyn Boy and B4bonah, and diaspora fashion leaders such as Edward Enninful, editor-in-chief of British Vogue, and the late Virgil Abloh at Louis Vuitton. “There’s a feeling of opportunity in Accra,” he suggests, “like we’re a new hotbed of creativity – like Paris in the 1920s.”

• Photo London 2023 is at Somerset House, London, WC2 from Wednesday 10 to Sunday 14 May

Tisha Kavanagh would know if there were luminescent mushrooms in Nelson, her home along Victoria’s Glenelg River that borders South Australia.

Ms Kavanagh has walked up and down the river every night for 20 years.

Used to crawling the ground on her hands and knees to examine any mushrooms with her camera, she always keeps an eye out for fungi.

After hearing reports of ghost mushrooms 90 kilometres away in Mount Burr, South Australia, Ms Kavanagh was being extra vigilant on her walks three weeks ago.

According to Forestry SA, a ghost mushroom, which is native to Australia, emits a soft green glow at night. It can often be found growing on decaying plant material.

Recent wet weather had resulted in a flurry of mushroom growth, with all kinds of varieties springing up in decent sizes. 

“I’ve honestly never seen so many mushrooms as I have in Nelson at the moment,” Ms Kavanagh said.

“So I came home very excited and spoke to my son and said, ‘You know, I think we should go back after dark and just see whether they are ghosts mushrooms’.”

Ms Kavanagh admits it took a little while to find them again in the dark.

“[But] as soon as we [turned our torches off], we just saw, not just this tree that I’d seen starting to glow and light up, but all the little individual mushrooms all in the scrub as well,” she said.

“There was one tree that … must have [had] 20 clumps. And they were all around the bottom of it and all up the tree itself.

Exciting viewing experience 

As well as returning herself, Ms Kavanagh has been spreading the word about what she’s seen.

Her favourite responses are from those who weren’t initially enthused, like a friend’s teenage daughter.

“She said she was squealing with delight when she saw them,” Ms Kavanagh said.

“I’ve got teenagers myself. And sometimes I think that the virtual world can be very alluring to our teenage generation.

Working as a doctor at the Mount Gambier prison, Ms Kavanagh’s passion is photography.

“There’s not a day goes by that I’m not out taking and sharing photographs,” she said.

“It’s such an amazing way of sharing what’s around us.

Look but don’t damage

Ms Kavanagh is happy to share the location on the proviso people respect the area.

“Mostly on the tracks either side of Simpsons Landing. So if you walk either way out of that car park along the river, the mushrooms are there,” she said.

“Obviously, it needs to be a really dark night. So full moon nights are not your friend if you’re looking for them.

“And obviously away from houses or any ambient lights. So you’ve got to get to the real pitch dark areas, and then they just all start coming out before your eyes basically.