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Terese Mailhot, author of “Heart Berries: A Memoir,” gives a warm welcome to the crowd in the Student Center, located at 754 S. Wabash Ave., on Thursday, April 20, 2023. From the Seabird Island Band, Mailhot’s work has appeared in Guernica, The Guardian, Mother Jones, Medium, Al Jazeera, the Los Angeles Times and “Best American Essays.”
Two Indigenous artists visited Columbia in events that were part of Columbia’s new series “Listening to Indigenous Voices,” hosted by the English and Creative Writing Department.
New York Times best-selling author Terese Mailhot read from her memoir, “Heart Berries,” and signed copies on Thursday, April 20, at the Student Center. On Friday, April 21, multimedia visual artist Debra Yepa-Pappan spoke about her work with the Field Museum to create Native American exhibits that accurately portrayed the culture.
The goal of the events is to increase the “air time” of Native American people in the school, said Jeanne Petrolle, acting chair of the English and Creative Writing department.
“We simply don’t study history enough from a Native American perspective,” Petrolle said. “In order to understand history truthfully, we need the perspectives of Indigenous writers and artists so we can understand our actual history and where we actually live.”
Carolina Ayala, a senior creative writing major, helped secure the grants to fund the events. They gave an introductory speech for Mailhot and said their work inspired them.
“I was hungry for lives that looked like mine; starving for words that felt familiar,” Ayala said.
As an Indigenous Mexican, Ayala wanted to start an Indigenous students group on-campus before they graduated this spring. They hope to connect with Indigenous professor Luanne Redeye to organize the group after Ayala graduates.
After reading two excerpts from her memoir, Mailhot answered audience questions. She discussed her writing process and how she gained the confidence to share her work under the pressure of being in a predominately white institution.
“Sometimes you’re truly magnificent and people don’t want to witness it, especially Native women,” Mailhot said. “When we have talent, it is threatening because we talk about land back; we talk about murdered and missing Indigenous women; we talk about disparity.”
Yepa-Pappan spoke to Columbia students about confronting stereotypes of Indigenous people through art. Chicago’s Field Museum had an exhibit displayed for over 50 years that did not accurately portray Native Americans.
Yepa-Pappan said she was embarrassed by the museum’s exhibit but then found herself helping them renovate the Native American hall.
“I kicked in the door to get into the museum so that I could hold that door open for other Native people to come in,” Yepa-Pappan said. “They have a lot of our things there in the museum and we need access to that. Those are our relatives. Those are our ancestors and we need to connect with them.”
Her non-profit Center for Native Futures is an art gallery that will feature Native artists and host programs. The center is set to open this fall in the Marquette building downtown.
“We want to provide a home for those Native students that come to Columbia or the School of the Art Institute,” Yepa-Pappan said. “There are always a few, but they are always there.”
The first event, held on March 17, featured Indigenous advocate Meranda Roberts. The event series was funded by grants obtained by Columbia’s offices of Academic Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and Student Diversity and Inclusion.
More programming highlighting Indigenous voices is being planned for next year, Petrolle said. A “super special guest” is in the works, but the school is waiting on the grant to lock that in.
Ayala said the goal of creating an Indigenous group and events is to acknowledge the European influence that is upon the school, from the roots of English departments to the name Columbia being named after Christopher Columbus.
“It’s important that not only do we talk about these things, but that it’s someone like me that’s talking about these things,” Ayala said.
Ayala said they want the Indigenous student group to participate in Columbia’s student council, networking and community events.
“It will become so much easier to continuously remind students that you are in Chicago — this is the land you’re on, this is the air you’re breathing, this is where your art is being created,” Ayala said.
Polaroid and instant film photography supporters are invited to PolaCon in New York City to celebrate all things instant film photography.
The three-day PolaCon NYC event, running from May 19-21 at various locations in “The Big Apple,” includes photo walks, meet-ups, presentations, and special events designed to help people meet like-minded photographers, share their work, learn from talented professionals, and check out the latest instant film gear and techniques.
PolaCon was founded in 2015 by the Instant Film Society (IFS) and previous events have been held in Texas and California. The upcoming PolaCon NYC marks the first time the event has been in New York.
IFS itself was founded in 2012 to “increase awareness, accessibility, and understanding of instant film photography.” As part of that mission, IFS partnered with camera shops, local camera clubs, and film collectives as part of PolaCon.
“We are excited to bring together the instant film photography community for a weekend of creativity, education, and fun. Our goal is to create a welcoming and communal environment where photographers can connect with others who share a similar passion for instant film,” says the organizers of PolaCon NYC.
Alongside workshops, demos, artist talks, and photo walks, the event promises many other fun and educational events, including scavenger hunts, giveaways, “revelry,” and “dancing.” The convention’s website includes a full breakdown of the full schedule of events, including locations and event descriptions. Brooklyn Film Camera is the primary hub for the event, hosting meet-ups, check-ins, and the event’s wrap party on May 21.
PolaCon NYC is sponsored by Polaroid, Wyckoff Windows Studios, Brooklyn Brewery, and Liquid Death.
In recent years, film and instant film photography have experienced a surge in popularity. There are a lot of instant cameras on the market, and PetaPixel’s guide to “The Best Instant Cameras in 2023” cuts through the noise to deliver an in-depth overview of instant photography’s best gear, including PolaCon’s sponsor, Polaroid’s Now+, named the “Best Classic Instant Camera.”
PolaCon NYC tickets and merchandise are on sale now. Tickets grant entry to “the entire weekend of programming” and cost $35.
Image credits: PolaCon NYC
The Spring Art Market returns on Mother’s Day weekend with 40+ artisans and artists filling the Tannery Arts campus. Produced by Arts Council Santa Cruz County the annual market will run from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, May 13th.
The free family-friendly event offers a wide range of activities for the shoppers and art admirers alike. Local artisans will be showcasing and selling their work. Throughout the market you will find handmade ceramics, unique jewelry, paintings and prints, candles, self-care products, one-of-a-kind clothing, and much more.
The Spring Art Market will represent a gorgeous variety of locally made fine art, including painting, woodworking, ceramics, and jewelry. There’s nothing like the beauty of flowers and art to celebrate spring!
— Bree Karpavage, Spring Art Market Coordinator
The campus will be brought to life with live music from La Familla De Calle and Aquin, consisting of Genoa Brown and Jase “Monk” Earl with beer and wine from Santa Cruz Mountain Brewing and Big Basin Vineyards available for purchase. Also on the menu Arts Council has secured Epoch Foods, Taquizas Gabriel, and sweet treats from LaLi for anyone looking for a bite to eat.
Guests can also savor the spring season with local flowers for sale from Happy Patch Flowers, Quaintrelle Farms, and Localife Flowers. “The diversity of artists this year is amazing,” says Bree Karpavage, Spring Art Market Coordinator and founder of the Santa Cruz Mountains Makers Markets.
Youngsters and the young at heart can engage in free art activities, such as a glass blowing demo with Chris Mosley, Public Art Bingo with Linda Cover, and Bird Quest with Suzy Radonsky. Local artist Kirk McNeill will also be spinning the Sharky-Go-Round.
“The Spring Art Market is a beautiful way to celebrate Mother’s Day weekend,” says Mercedes Lewis, Tannery Program Manager for Arts Council Santa Cruz County. “Bring the whole family and find the perfect gift for all the special women in your life while supporting our local creative entrepreneurs.”
The Tannery Arts Center Spring Art Market is a must-attend event for those who appreciate fine art, music, and delicious food and drink. With something for everyone, it’s the perfect way to spend Mother’s Day weekend with family and friends.
When it rains, it pours. Recent controversies have shown that photography competitions, even large, prestigious ones, are woefully unprepared for the ongoing artificial intelligence (AI) revolution.
For the last few years, it’s been all too easy to dismiss AI images as “easy to spot.” However, as recent events demonstrate, competitions should no longer kick the AI-generated can farther down the road, try as some contest organizers might.
After PetaPixel broke the news that a self-described “photo media artist,” Boris Eldagsen, won first place in the Creative category of the 2023 Sony World Photography Awards Open competition with an AI-generated image. The floodgates opened, and a firestorm of controversy commenced.
To Eldagsen’s credit, he declined the prize, although in doing so, perhaps inadvertently embarrassed the competition with which he claims to have wanted a meaningful discussion.
Can cheating be a good or just action if it has good intentions, or is it “bad” in and of itself? In either case, the World Photography Organization isn’t interested in open dialogue with Eldagsen about AI technology.
The more pervasive issue isn’t that Eldagsen broke the rules, no matter what he hoped to achieve by doing so. Rather, it is that one of the most prominent photography competitions in the world appears to have no idea how to handle AI-generated images — which are synthesized frauds that have no place in a photography competition.
The Sony World Photography Awards does not mention artificial intelligence in its rules and regulations. That omission isn’t unique to the Sony World Photography Awards or the World Photography Organization. It’s a pattern issue across the board.
AI is new-ish, but I’m nonetheless surprised that competitions haven’t tossed something about AI into the long list of legalese to cover themselves in the event of, well, exactly what happened in this year’s Sony World Photography Awards.
That said, a quick look at the rules at the bottom of this page shows that there are some rules that someone could reasonably apply to AI-generated images, even though AI isn’t expressly mentioned.
4.1.1 You are the sole owner and author of each Entry
4.1.6 Each Entry does not infringe upon the copyrights, trademarks, contract rights, or any other intellectual property rights of any third person or entity, or violate any person’s rights of privacy or publicity…
AI models, apart from Adobe Firefly, are built on stolen images — they’re trained using someone else’s photos without their explicit permission. While the precise assembly of the group of pixels comprising an AI-generated image may be wholly novel, the information that led to the creation of that content isn’t — it was someone else’s work, either grabbed from the public domain or outright stolen from the original creator. You may not see the family tree of unoriginality and theft in the final AI-generated image, but it’s there, hiding just beneath the surface.
I contend that an AI-generated image violates each rule above. I don’t believe the person who makes an image in Midjourney, for example, is the sole owner and author of the picture. I also think that, at least in many cases, the synthesized image violates copyright. If something is built using stolen parts, it’s not much of a leap to say that the very existence of the creation represents theft. At the very least, AI-generated art has no legal protection, at least not yet. You can’t currently copyright AI-generated art, implying a lack of creative ownership.
However, these rules aren’t sufficient to deal with AI-generated imagery because they occupy a gray area and don’t explicitly mention AI.
The 2023 Sony World Photography Awards may be the first major photo contest to be propelled into the public eye, but it’s not the first significant photo contest to be embroiled in an AI controversy.
Another prestigious photo competition, the Fine Art Photography Awards, has been fighting (smaller) AI fires since it announced its winners earlier this month. However, the fight has been chiefly contained, never erupting into a full-scale media frenzy.
Photographer Cheraine Collette, who never replied to PetaPixel’s request for comment, won the “Fine Art Photographer of the Year, Professional Category” prize at the ninth annual Fine Art Photography Awards with her photo series, Exquisite Beauty.
The series celebrates the stories of “The exquisite beauty and strength” of the roughly 1-in-20,000 African people born with albinism. Some individuals are celebrated, while others are ostracized. In both extremes, the lives of many albino Africans are fundamentally different from their peers.
Telling this story is an admirable objective, and the photo series is impressive and eye-catching. However, some people have questioned the authenticity of Collette’s winning images. The skepticism surrounding Collette’s winning images was immediate and boisterous.
The Fine Art Photography Awards weighed in quickly, commenting on its Instagram post announcing Collette’s victory:
“Dear participants and debaters, we are watching the discussion that has been going on since the publication of the competition results with great interest. We will not refer here to the results themselves, which do not violate our rules and were chosen after a fair vote by the judges.”
“At the same time, we understand the concerns of the community, and we are also looking at AI technology, which seems to be the next step in the digital revolution and, like any such tool, carries both risks and opportunities for creators. Therefore, we decided to add additional verification of winners in subsequent editions of our event. They may be asked to provide RAW files if there is any doubt about the creative process behind the image. These rules will appear soon in our terms and conditions.”
“At the same time, we would like to thank everyone for an interesting discussion, we look forward to the future of photography and digital art!”
Although Collette didn’t respond to PetaPixel’s request for comment, she did add her comment on the legitimacy of her victory on that same Instagram post:
“These portraits are all photographed by me. Composed of different photographs I’ve created, like I’ve always done for almost a decade. First of all, thank you Fine Art Photography Awards for the amazing award! It’s a dream come true! I’ve had a best friend with albinism for over seven years and I’ve experienced a lot of struggles she faced. That’s why I wanted to create a series on this subject. It’s heartwarming that this new series received incredibly positive feedback so far. Nowadays with AI getting more realistic by the day, apparently, everything seems AI-generated.”
I can see the arguments both ways. However, it appears I’m in the minority based on the Instagram post announcing Collette’s win.
One commenter says, “The artist has maintained the pictures are created from real shots of people, but real people have irises the correct shape and they don’t have four fingers. So, I’m done, I tried to be as open as possible to this. I feel the only way to disprove everyone’s concerns is to just name and tag the models, that’s easy and quick to do if they are real people.”
Someone else adds, “AI is not photography. Rather, it steals from actual photographers to attempt to get better. These images are clearly AI.”
“In one of the other images from this set, the model has four fingers. None of them look entirely real, but this should be a dead giveaway. Not real,” another commenter writes.
Other people have demanded to see RAW image files and want the models tagged to prove they are real.
That demand skirts dangerously close to a situation where someone “with nothing to hide” is expected to answer all critics and prove that they’re not lying. If that situation devolves, as it frequently does, into one where someone refusing to submit proof to refute a claim is itself treated as evidence that an allegation is true. That is not how it should work.
A protected source tells PetaPixel that the “truth” is “actually worse” than Collette using AI to generate her images. As tempting as it is to speculate about what “actually worse” could entail, this isn’t the arena to do so.
Cheraine Collette satisfied the Fine Art Photography Awards’ concerns, if they had any, and won the award. As far as her prize goes, that’s the end of the story.
To Collette’s credit, her response, if not necessarily convincing, is at least interesting. I want to pinpoint this part of what Collette wrote on Instagram: “Nowadays with AI getting more realistic by the day, apparently, everything seems AI-generated.”
I think this gets to the crux of the issue. Once a big competition is fooled, like the Sony World Photography Awards appear to have been, the public’s trust not just in a specific contest is shaken, but people are less trustworthy of photography itself.
This theme of mistrust isn’t new. Photoshop is really powerful and has been used to deceive viewers for a long time. Before the digital age, photographers still heavily manipulated images.
In many cases, such as with fine art photography, there isn’t anything wrong with manipulating an image.
However, AI somehow feels different. To many photographers, myself included, something is jarring and gross about an AI-generated image being passed off as authentic photography.
It concerns me that AI has advanced to the point where someone may present an image to me, claiming it’s a photograph, and I may be unable to tell if they’re lying. It makes me question my abilities as a photographer, which is an uncomfortable feeling.
For example, Collette’s images seem obviously AI to some and not-so-obviously fake to others, like me. The fact that the pictures are so polarizing is concerning in and of itself. Whether Collette’s photos utilized AI at all or are outright entirely generated by AI is beside the point — the fact that there’s active debate about them is damaging enough to the legitimacy of the Fine Art Photography Awards and photo contests at large.
Lying and misrepresentation are undoubtedly wrong. But what I’m beginning to realize is perhaps even worse than being deceived on occasion and suffering a blow to my ego in the process is that I now find myself viewing all photography with a skeptical eye. It’s often said that people “see what they want to see,” but I’d argue that it’s even easier, and much more harmful, to see what you fear most.
The ability for photographers to bypass rules and fairness using AI technology has rendered all photography a bit less trustworthy, and that genuinely devastates me. It is painful to think that I might forever view the work of others through doubt-tinted glasses.
The Sony World Photography Awards’ response, or lack thereof, is problematic. At this point, I remain unconvinced that Sony isn’t just treating the Eldagsen situation as a one-off and trying to move past it without fundamentally shifting how they judge entries and handle questionable images.
On the other hand, the Fine Art Photography Awards, while unwilling to explain much about Collette’s winning photo series, has announced that subsequent editions of the contest will have rules in place that require photographers to be willing and able to submit RAW image files for inspection in cases where the judges aren’t sure about the provenance of an image.
That’s a good approach but perhaps insufficient. Someone could still fake their way through that process but enacting any roadblock to an AI image winning an award is a step in the right direction, especially one that’s easy for genuine photographers to satisfy, should the issue arise. It’s far better than throwing one’s hands in the air and saying, “I give up!”
A comment on Instagram referenced something else that deserves consideration, making special categories for AI-generated and AI-assisted photography. If you can’t outright prevent AI artists from entering work in photography competitions, giving them a place to play may prevent them from entering categories in which they don’t belong.
By the way, I don’t believe there’s anything inherently wrong with AI technology, nor do I think there’s no place for it in art. Photographers and other artists have long utilized advancing technology to tell their stories better and evoke emotions in viewers.
I also think that artists using AI have artistic talent. Truly exceptional work still, at least for now, requires more than throwing a prompt into a generative AI model.
The problem is that when all but a few bad actors compete in good faith on equal footing, and a wolf enters in sheep’s clothing, it does a disservice to fellow competitors, photo competitions, and perhaps most damningly, the institution of photography itself.
Is requiring RAW images or giving AI artists their own categories removing water from a sinking boat using a sieve? Perhaps. But something must be done, and quickly, because the option for photo contests to twiddle their thumbs and wait for AI to “blow over” or become a bigger problem has come and gone.
I’m not trying to attack the World Photography Organization, the Sony World Photography Awards, the Fine Art Photography Awards, or any photographers I’ve mentioned. But you can’t un-ring a bell, and AI hasn’t just rung the bell; the AI-generated bellringer is creating an immense, unending racket.
Photo contests must find a way to quiet the noise — or at least acknowledge it — before it’s too late. We’re rapidly approaching a point of no return, where photo contests and their winners are no longer given the respect and reverence they deserve.
This story is part of PetaPixel’s weekly newsletter Clipped Highlights.
Clipped Highlights is a free, curated, weekly newsletter that will be sent out every Wednesday morning and will focus on a few of the most important stories of the previous week and explain why they deserve your attention. This newsletter is different from our daily news brief in that it provides unique insights that can only be found in Clipped Highlights.
In addition to unique takes on the biggest stories in photography, art, and technology, Clipped Highlights will also serve to feature at least one photo series or art project that we think is worth your time to check out. So often in the technology and imaging space we focus on the how and not the what. We think that it’s just as important, if not more so, to look at the art created by photographers around the world as it is to celebrate the new technologies that makes that artwork possible.
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Dario Rodriguez paints Jesus in “The Hook” a youth center at Lighthouse Christian Ministries in Wenatchee on April 18. Children’s Ministry director Adam Mitchell says he hopes to open the room as a place for teens ages 13-17 to gather. The room was previously used for storage.
WENATCHEE — Tattoo artist and immigrant, Dario Rodriguez, said he knows what it’s like to struggle to find a space where he belongs.
That’s why the 27-year-old said he volunteered to spray paint a graffiti mural inside the Lighthouse Christian Ministries facility for a potential new teen center.
Dario Rodriguez poses in front of a partially finished mural he is painting in “The Hook,” a future youth center at Lighthouse Christian Ministries in Wenatchee on April 18.
Dario Rodriguez uses spray paint while wearing a respirator for the fumes as he paints a mural at a Lighthouse Christian Ministries’ future youth center on April 18.
