The evening is warm, the party has gone late. How warm, how late: it’s hard to say. Enough that the window is cracked open, a black square of night visible beyond it. Warm enough and late enough that everyone is on the floor. Two people lie side by side, knees bent beneath them. In the corner, someone’s on their back, fingers wrapped around a glass beer bottle. It’s hard, in the photograph, to say where one body ends and another begins. Yes, we are at that point in the party. An empty pack of cigarettes lies stranded toward the bottom of the frame, its smoke gone somewhere out the window and into the night. 

When I first saw this image—the 2008 photograph Birthday Party by the German artist Wolfgang Tillmans—it was a small printout, taped to the wall of the co-operative house in Boston where I lived for my last year of college. I mistook it, at first, for a photo taken in that house. It was an easy mistake to make. How many times had I seen a scene like this—of sticky wine and smoke and uncomplicated touch from all sides—happen here? Countless. They blurred together in my mind. Seeing Tillmans’ photo, these moments shuffled into focus with uncanny clarity. It was like coming across a high-definition rendering of a faded memory: a memory that was not mine, of course, but that felt, somehow, like it was. 

The photo hangs now at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), where Tillmans’ exhibit To look without fear—the first major showing of the photographer’s work in Canada—opens this month. To look without fear arrives after its debut at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) last fall, drawing together images from across three decades of the artist’s career. Dispatches from ’90s queer clubs in Berlin and London sit beside abstract compositions of form and colour across from still lifes of flowers and lobsters. Together, these assembled works ask for a certain way of looking, one suggested by the exhibit’s infinitive title. Describing what motivates him to capture a moment, Tillmans has remarked: “I want to record it, so there is a record of it.” His record urges the viewer to remember places and intimacies and pleasures that might otherwise blur into the past—out of focus, out of view. 

Even if the name Wolfgang Tillmans is unfamiliar, there’s a good chance that you’ve seen his work. In 2017, Tillmans’ portrait of Frank Ocean, titled Frank, in the shower, appeared on the cover of Ocean’s acclaimed album Blonde. In the photo, Ocean’s hand obscures his face, green buzzcut peeking out above. Last year Tillman’s work surfaced in bookstores when The Cock (kiss)—a photo of two men, well, kissing—was featured on the cover of the novel Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart. These ongoing circulations of Tillmans’ photography are both a testament to his wide-ranging influence on our visual culture (he’s been called “one of the world’s most significant living artists” by the New York Times), as well as a barometer of his continuing influence on queer artists across forms. 

Tillmans was born in 1969 in the small German manufacturing town of Remscheid. As a teenager, Tillmans would catch the train into London—ostensibly to take English classes, which he did, but also to put on lipstick in the train station and try his luck at the city’s gay nightclubs, getting back on the train home before midnight. One of his earliest photographs that he considers a work of art is a self-portrait from 1986, Lacanau (Self). Tillmans holds the camera from above, angling it down at his body. What we see is a wide swath of pink T-shirt, his leg barely separated from the ground beneath it. It’s both hyper-realist and willfully abstract, charged with the youthful exertion of a body feeling out its proportional space in the world.

Tillmans photography has gone on to consider that question of how to render, in two dimensions, the three-dimensional problem of the human body—its constraints and liberations, its sculptural possibilities. He’s an attentive and accomplished portraitist in the fashion world, whose photos of Kate Moss and Chloë Sevigny appear in To look without fear. But the body really comes alive, under Tillmans’ lens, in scenes of proximity and obscurity—in nightclubs and house parties, bathrooms and bedrooms. “I want to capture the community of being together,” Tillmans explains during a preview of the AGO show, “as a couple, as friends, as a group, as a mass. Sharing this togetherness is also always sharing solidarity, shouldering and appreciating the hardship and joy of what it means to be alive.”

In the 1990s, Tillmans started to create a growing body of these images when he left Germany to study photography in the U.K. He’d tried his hand at art school back home, but dropped out after six weeks—one day before the Berlin Wall fell. In England, Tillmans stuck with it, producing lasting works of, as he puts it, “guys and girls feeling each other on the dance floor.” One 1992 series titled Chemistry Squares depicts scenes at Chemistry, a house and techno night at the now-defunct Sound Shaft club in London. (As a rule, Tillmans does not display images of underground spaces or parties until they have closed down.) The dozens of images are just glimpses—each a small square of detail, a couple inches wide, displayed side by side—as if caught between strobe lights on the dancefloor. A hand with a cigarette. A back of a neck. A flash of hair beneath a raised arm.

As a “record” of those evenings, the photographs leave much unsaid. We have no sense of what Chemistry looked like, who was in attendance, how much it cost to get in. Tillmans’ photos are evocative, however, as coordinates to the heat map of that night, witnessed from up close. The camera knows—and so tells us—how one person saw another, the facts of skin that formed the bodies that formed the crowd. Perhaps, the photos suggest, you must get this close to understand what it was really like to be there. So close that now, decades after the club has closed, sweat still collects on a neck beneath the lights.

At the AGO artist preview, Tillmans, wearing a green jacket from ’90s-influenced streetwear brand Palace, passes through the gallery rooms while discussing the past few days. He’s been busy. In collaboration with his team and the museum, the artist has adapted his MoMA exhibit specifically for the AGO space. Pieces have been resized, rearranged. Today, a week out from the exhibit’s opening, Tillmans is focused and deliberative, but never serious. His smile flashes often. At one point, Tillmans indicates a pair of metal beams where two images are affixed. “These beams interested me,” he says, “because they are 12 inches—the size of the prints I’ve been using since the early ’90s.” He smiles again. “I’m like a child when he realizes something fits.”

As has become standard for Tillmans’ exhibits, most photos in To look without fear are displayed without frames. Instead, the artist uses Scotch Tape or binder clips to hang his images. It’s an improvised, offhand aesthetic that belies its careful planning, orchestrated down to the inch. The exhibit, arranged in roughly chronological order, forces you to use your body—leaning back to see one photo, bending down to see the next. When the MoMA show premiered last fall, critics and viewers alike talked about that sense of scale, with scenes of the past surrounding you from all directions. Crowded raves and old Pride parades. Adidas tracksuits and clunky bass synthesizers. One reviewer confessed: “The show made me so nostalgic that at times, I wanted to crouch down and weep.”

But there’s more than easy nostalgia at work here. History, in these rooms, is too unresolved, too particular to Tillmans’ life. Halfway through the first room, I come across a large sepia image from 1995 titled Deer Hirsch. In it, Jochen Hirsch—Tillmans’ first love, who passed of AIDS-related pneumonia two years after the photo was taken—stands facing a deer on a wide beach. Hirsch’s hands are raised, indicating he has no more food to give. The deer sticks out its tongue in reply. “The photo looks like it was a big production,” Tillmans admits, “but in fact it was just an afternoon walk. What you are seeing is that Jochen had just fed all our food to the deer.” There’s such suspended tenderness in the image that I hesitated to speak when near it—out of reverence for having stepped into Tillmans’ memory, out of care not to startle the animal away.

For Tillmans, the past is unresolved, particular—and alive. In a final room containing work from the current millennium, the artist shifts the scale of his archival eye. Several tables fill the large space, each one covered with fragments of text. There are newspaper articles about the Iraq war. There are think pieces about the rise of homophobia and nationalism. There are scientific reports on microplastics in the human body. It’s part of the series titled truth study center, a collection of media sources that construct the reality according to which our lives are governed. On the surrounding walls, the exhibit assembles photos we might think of as archetypal Tillmans: a hand reaching into a pair of red gym shorts, a queer club in New York. The tables sit below, gazing up, as reminders of the operations of power that run always beneath these intimate scenes. (When I say always, I mean it: I was surprised to find an article discussing caste discrimination in the Toronto school system, dated just two weeks prior.)

“History is not something other,” Tillmans explains. “History is right here and now, and we have to take care of this moment.” Keeping a record of our moment, for Tillmans, still involves capturing the shared choreographies of “being together.” Yet he also acts, increasingly, as a custodian of large-scale power structures that define past and present. In all of these roles, Tillmans is engaged in a practice that asks us to look at—and then remember—what is at risk of going unseen. Something so small it escapes notice: a splinter in the foot, a touch in a crowded club. Something so big it evades depiction: beliefs we take for granted, invisible as air, about the way things must be.

Looking up from the tables, I notice, in a far corner, Birthday Party—the same photo of a warm evening years ago that hangs in a house where I once lived. Or, almost the same one. Tillmans considers each print of his to be a distinct physical fact, defined by its material quality and where it is placed in the world. Again pointing out something I hadn’t noticed, he indicates the thin shadow cast between image and wall. “Looking sideways, we can see that this is not nothing. A photograph is actually a body.” I turn around and take in the crowded gallery walls, dozens of images and their shadows filling the room. As Tillmans walks ahead, quick enough that some air displaces around him, you could swear—for a moment—the photos behind him begin to move.

Berlin-based Boris Eldagsen won the creative open category at this year’s Sony World Photography Award with his entry “Pseudomnesia: The Electrician.”

The eerie black and white image shows two women from different generations — the older woman appearing to hang on to the younger woman from behind.

Organizers said they were made aware of some AI involvement, but said there had been “deliberate” attempts to mislead them.

Eldagsen said he hoped his actions would open up the conversation around the issue and lead to “separate competitions for AI-generated images.”

“Thank you for selecting my image and making this a historic moment, as it is the first AI generated image to win in a prestigous (sic) international PHOTOGRAPHY competition. How many of you knew or suspected that it was AI generated? Something about this doesn’t feel right, does it?”

He continued: “AI images and photography should not compete with eachother in an award like this. They are different entities. AI is not photography. Therefore I will not accept the award.”

He said he applied “as a cheeky monkey” to find out if the competitions “are prepared for AI images to enter. They are not.”

‘Not about winning’

Eldagsen told CNN Tuesday: “It shows that at the moment the photographic world has been taken by surprise after this development that subtly you can create images that look like photography but you don’t need to have the skills and expertise of photographers.”

He said that AI had left many photographers feeling “threatened and afraid that they are going to lose their jobs which will happen.”

Eldagsen said his intention was not to create trouble, but to open up an important conversation.

“It was not about winning anything,” he said. “I was just making a test to see if they were aware — like a hacker who hacks a system not to exploit it, but to see if there are weaknesses.”

In further statements on his website, he said he had informed the organizers of AI involvement.

Organizers said that 2023 had seen the highest number of entries in the awards’ 16-year history. More than 415,000 images were entered across this year’s competitions, with more than 180,000 of them eligible for the professional categories.

Three finalists, as well as five to seven shortlisted photographers, were chosen in each category. The selected images were shot by photographers from more than 30 countries in locations ranging from an abandoned cement factory in China to a fish market in Somalia.

‘Misleading’ claims

The World Photography Organisation, which runs the competition, told CNN in statement Tuesday that, during the competition’s exchanges with Eldagsen ahead of announcing him as a category winner on March 14, he had confirmed the “co-creation” of this image using AI.

“The creative category of the open competition welcomes various experimental approaches to image making from cyanotypes and rayographs to cutting-edge digital practices,” organizers said.

“As such, following our correspondence with Boris and the warranties he provided, we felt that his entry fulfilled the criteria for this category, and we were supportive of his participation. Additionally, we were looking forward to engaging in a more in-depth discussion on this topic and welcomed Boris’ wish for dialogue by preparing questions for a dedicated Q&A with him for our website.

“As he [Eldagsen] has now decided to decline his award we have suspended our activities with him and in keeping with his wishes have removed him from the competition. Given his actions and subsequent statement noting his deliberate attempts at misleading us, and therefore invalidating the warranties he provided, we no longer feel we are able to engage in a meaningful and constructive dialogue with him.”

The statement said organizers recognize “the importance of this subject and its impact on image-making today.”

“While elements of AI practices are relevant in artistic contexts of image-making, the awards always have been and will continue to be a platform for championing the excellence and skill of photographers and artists working in the medium,” the World Photography Organisation added.

Top image: Boris Eldagsen’s AI-generated image titled ‘Pseudomnesia: The Electrician’ was submitted to the Sony World Photography Awards 2023 and won first prize in the creative open category.

Above: video clip from the movie Godland that shows the difficulties faced in taking just one photograph 150 years ago!

There have some been some great movies over the years that have had photographers as their central characters. From Hitchcock’s thriller Rear Window, to Antonioni’s Blow Up, cameras and photography have been keen parts of the plot of many remarkable cinema dramas. But for my money, the new art-house drama Godland has to be a new entry to the list of the best movies about image making.

Godland is set in the late nineteenth century, and its central character is a Norwegian priest who is sent to Iceland to build a new church. As a keen photographer, he takes his camera with him, and takes the scenic route to his destination so as to take his photos.

The film is packed with drama – love, hate, and death all feature – and there is even a wedding and a funeral. But it is a somber and tragic tale – told with breathtaking imagery by the director Hlynur Palmason and cinematographer Maria van Hausswolff.

Above: the trailer for the movie

But for me, as a photographer, it is the pains that the Lucas the priest has to go to to take his pictures that are the real attraction. The conceit of the movie is that he has taken just seven images on its trip, and the film shows you how each of them are taken.

He starts his voyage with a box full of around a dozen glass plates. And for each exposure he has to coat them with silver nitrate powder and other chemicals, before placing them in his mahogany plate camera. As soon as each exposure (lasting several seconds) is completed, he immediately has to develop the image on the plate in a separate portable darkroom. As you can see from the clip at the top of the page – it is a process fraught with difficulties!

The whole film is shot in 4:3 format – with rounded corners – almost as if we are seeing the action unfold through the plate camera itself. We don’t see the finished black-and-white photographs themselves – but instead see each frame as a part of the colored movie, as if we are viewing a cinemagraph. 

Godland is currently on limited cinema release in the USA, and can be streamed in the UK through Curzon Home Cinema (opens in new tab).

If you are looking for more films about photography, check out the 25 top films about fictional photographers (opens in new tab), or if you want something more factual, see the 25 best movies about real photographers (opens in new tab)

When it comes to the best camera phones, three names come to mind instantly: Apple’s iPhones, the Samsung Galaxy Ultra series and the Google Pixels, but this phone aims to one-up all of them.

The biggest change from the iPhones and Galaxies of the world, however, is that the Xiaomi 13 Ultra aims to capture images with a genuine “camera look” instead of the typical over-processed “smartphone look” photos. And Xiaomi has iconic camera maker Leica on its side to do just that.

Xiaomi says that thanks to clever processing, you can have optimal quality in six focal lengths: 0.5X (12mm), 1X (23mm), 2X (46mm), 3.2X (75mm), 5X (120mm), and 10X (240mm).

The main camera also comes with a variable aperture that can go from f/1.9 to f/4.0, which is nice. At f/1.9 the background becomes blurry so you can better focus on one subject, and at f/4.0 pretty much everything is in focus.

But Xiaomi specifically made a point that it is addressing the “digital look” of modern smartphones and instead wants to give you a natural, real camera photos that are not over-processed to infinity. A key part of that is optics with the Summicron lens we have to solve the oversharpening problem by focusing on optics.

The Xiaomi 13 Ultra also comes with a special street photography mode, which allows you to capture a shot at just 0.8 seconds.

In the words of CEO Lei Jun, the one word to describe this camera system is “professional”.

Design and Colors

Second generation nano-skin for a leather-like soft touch feel

The camera theme carries over to the design of the phone that overall looks a lot like a traditional camera. Key for that effect is the leather like finish. Xiaomi calls this a second generation nano-skin, and it has superb stain resistance and a nice soft touch feel to it.

The Xiaomi 13 Ultra comes in a choice of three colors:

The white one is particularly stunning in our opinions.

You can also notice how the camera are is slightly raised above the rest of the phone for this really cool and unique look that again helps better mimic what a real camera looks like.

Display

World’s brightest screen

Just a couple of weeks ago, we told you about the Oppo Find X6 Pro having the world’s brightest screen, but it is no longer at the number one spot as the Xiaomi 13 Ultra replaces it.

The 6.7″ screen on the Xiaomi hits an impressive 2,600 nits in bright sunlight in HDR mode, with a typical max brightness level of 1,300 nits.

Xiaomi is using a next generation display panel it calls a C7 panel, made by China Star, and it is said to be an even more impressive screen than the latest generation Samsung OLED panels.

Finally, this screen supports adaptive refresh rate from 1-120Hz, but unlike mainstream flagships it is also way easier on the eyes at night thanks to support for a higher, 1,920Hz pulse width modulation (PWM).

Performance

All of that is powered by the latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor.

Even the base model ships with 12GB of LPDDR5X RAM, and you have a selection of three storage options, the base one is 256GB, and you have a 512GB and even a 1TB model.

Interestingly, you might expect the chip to be best used in gaming, but Xiaomi explains that the camera actually has higher requirements for performance than even the most intense modern games.

The Xiaomi 13 Ultra also supports USB 3.2 speeds for faster transmission of files.

Battery and Charging

Equipped with a 5,000mAh battery, the Xiaomi 13 Ultra is on par with most Android phones.

Xiaomi uses the DOU measurement and tells us this phone scores 1.34 days, so it will last you more than one day, which is definitely a solid score.

You get support for both wired and wireless charging. The wired charging is 90W, and this gives you a 50% top-up in just 11 minutes, and a full charge takes just 34 minutes. For wireless charging, you get 50W speeds,  so a 19 minute top up boosts you to 50%, while a full charge on a compatible fast wireless charging takes 49 minutes.

Battery and charging safety and efficiency is taken care of the Surge P2 and G1 chips developed by Xiaomi that ensure a safe. Xiaomi has also built in a special extreme battery saver mode that kicks in at 1% and gives you 60 minutes of use or you can use it to make a 12 minute phone call.

Final Words

The Xiaomi 13 Ultra is a stunning phone for photography. Instead of just focusing on specs and trying to sell you that, it focuses on something more important: the actual camera processing.

We will have a full review and in-depth testing of the Xiaomi 13 Ultra camera system soon, so stay tuned for that.

In the depths of the pandemic, Peter Zurla stumbled into Dante’s “Inferno.”

After falling down the online rabbit hole, the 83-year-old Colorado Springs photographer found himself wrapped up in the classic piece of literature. He tried to read the original text, following Dante through nine circles of hell, but it was tough to understand. So he found other, more digestible translations of the work, and as he read he began to dream about using his old photos to illustrate Dante’s tale.

“Then it becomes this obsession that gets strange,” Zurla said.

He spent two years parsing his photos that stretched back to the ‘70s, manipulating them and creating composites to depict the journey into hell. His new exhibit, “Journey Into Hell — ‘Inferno,’” is open through April at The Garfield Gallery at Garfield School.

Zurla’s passion and talent for photography appeared later in life. He was in his early 40s during the late ‘60s and ‘70s when anti-war protests and the political landscape dominated headlines. Fascinated, he journeyed from New York City to Washington, D.C., where he started doing street photography.

“You’re in the middle of a crowd and smoke bombs are going off,” he said. “I was in my element. A friend was in the newspaper business and they gave me a press pass. I could go anywhere.”

Sharon Webster, his wife, remembers the darkroom Zurla built in his New York City apartment, the city where they met.

“Peter told me long ago he’s always had trouble expressing himself verbally,” she said, “but with photography he could express what he thought and felt.”

But then his photography habit came to a standstill. He put down the camera and didn’t pick it up for almost 50 years. Photos didn’t pay the bills. He had to work. And work he did, at all sorts of odd jobs in New York City and California. He was a hairstylist, a restaurant worker, a personal trainer, an employee at a mountaineering store. He and Webster moved to the Springs in 2002 because her mother was here.

Prostate cancer introduced a new wrinkle into his story. Afterward, his beat-up body could no longer do physical work, so he decided to buy a cheap camera. He wandered around the junkyard and by the railroad tracks, searching and finding interesting objects to capture. Turned out his keen eye for finding good photos was still intact, and his work made it into a few shows, including at Kreuser Gallery and in Pikes Peak Library District exhibits.

“I’m not doing it to make a living,” Zurla said. “I’m doing it because I like doing it and want others to see something I saw that maybe they didn’t see.”

And then came the pandemic, which really affected him psychologically and transformed his work, he says. It took a turn and grew darker, but he didn’t mind. In that darkness he felt creative. Not everyone loved it though. Friends who once enjoyed his photos told him they could no longer look at his work due to its darker nature.

“Before I would take it and hope someone would like it, but now I don’t care if you like it or not,” Zurla said. “It’s what I do. If I can create an emotion inside of you, like ‘oh, I hate it,’ I’ve done what I wanted to do. I had to get to the point where it’s my way of expressing myself.”

Contact the writer: 636-0270

Royal photographer Chris Jackson is counting on a bit of luck as he prepares to photograph the coronation of King Charles and Queen Camilla. He won’t know where he’s stationed until much closer to the event, and he doesn’t have much say in his position for the big day, but wherever he is, he’s sure to take pictures for the history books.

However, his favorite types of royal photography are not the big days like the coronation—rather times when the royal family is out of the public eye. “The quieter moments are often the ones that give you most sort of satisfaction,” he tells Town & Country over Zoom.”The quieter moments behind the scenes—because we so often don’t see behind the scenes photos of the royal family—are the photos which probably mean the most to me.”

His new book, Charles III: A King and His Queen, out today, focuses on the big moments, but also the quieter ones, of King Charles and Queen Camilla. While some photographs may be recognizable to the average royal fan, plenty are brand new. “I try my hardest to photograph not just these formal moments, but hopefully, some of them more candid moments, behind the scenes, and something a little bit different. I hope that the book gives you an insight into their character,” Jackson says of his new book. “We were super keen to finish it ahead of the coronation.”

Ahead of the coronation, and the release of Charles III, Jackson chatted with T&C all about the life of a royal photographer—and how he prepares for a momentous royal event.

What do you think people would be most surprised to learn about the career of a royal photographer?

It’s definitely not very glamorous! If there’s a big royal event, you want to get a good position, you need to be down there in advance. There’s generally quite a lot of waiting around, but generally goes quite quickly. You just find yourself doing your emails, not necessarily at home, but on location.

It’s an incredible job, it’s an incredible privilege to some of the places we’ve been to over the years. If you look at the book, there’s some more fairly sort of unexpected moments. One of my favorite shots is the King working in his outdoor office at Highgrove, immersed in the foliage and the stunning flora and fauna you get at Highgrove, which is really beautiful.

One of Jackson’s favorite photos from

Many of the pictures in Charles III have seen before, but some were surprising to me. One of my favorites was seeing someone dress up like a bear to make the little royals smile when you captured King Charles’s 70th birthday portrait. Can you talk about that moment?

I felt a lot of the pictures are not in my previous books, and certainly the ones behind the scenes with the King and the Queen—there’s a lot of moments where I haven’t talked about little things behind the pictures. In that particular picture, it’s always a huge privilege to photograph any kind of family moments with the royal family. Of course, as a photographer, there’s a sense of trepidation, an element of nerves—you want everything to go well on the day and you want them to be happy, smiling children.

We had this idea for the bear. I was delving through various fancy dress shops and online; I brought a bear suit and I went and tried out on my son when he was having a bath, and I think it scared the life out of him. I realized it probably had some rather large teeth. So I swiftly dispatched that bear suit, and managed to find a friendly one.

Obviously, there’s a nice photo of everyone smiling, looking at the camera. It’s nice to be able talk about what was going on in that particular picture. It’s a little bit more candid and relaxed due to the unexpected appearance of Mr. Bear. In the bear suit, I think it’s a senior press officer at the palace—someone who’s normally immaculately dressed. It was quite nice to see him wearing something a little bit more unusual, for sure.

Are there certain tips or tricks you’ve learned in photographing King Charles, something you know will get a good smile?

Obviously photographing certain people for a long time, you learn the different sides of their characters and their behaviors. That’s what’s so lovely about being a royal photographers, you get to know a small group of people quite well, but there’s enough of them to keep a sense of variety in the job.

Charles feeding chickens, one of the photographs in Jackson’s new book.

Certainly I’ve got to know the King’s nuances over the years. He is great to photograph; he has an energy—some days when I’m not feeling great, I wake up in the morning and I go to work and maybe I’m feeling bit like I need a couple of cups of coffee, he is always “on” when he arrives. Queen Elizabeth has obviously passed on a huge amount to the King.

But, this is a special day for all these people he’s meeting; it’s probably the one day they’ll ever meet a member of the royal family. So you need to be on, you need to be engaged, and both of them have a fantastic sense of humor. They immediately build a rapport with many of the people they’re meeting. I hope that comes across in the pictures across different communities. One thing I’ve always admired about [Charles and Camilla] both is they seem to keep calm amongst all this and just crack on and meet as many people as possible. It’s great fun, and it makes it really enjoyable.

What does your preparation look like to photograph these historic moments, like the Platinum Jubilee or Queen Elizabeth’s funeral?

The funny thing is, for lots of these moments, I’ve never experienced. I’ve never been part of a coronation. This is a first for me—a first for everyone. I can only look back to past large royal events, like the Platinum Jubilee in recent memory and take inspiration and experience from these events and royal weddings.

There’s a lot of elements that are similar, and there’s also lots of unexpected. I certainly found that difficult actually covering the passing of Queen Elizabeth. All this was totally new to me, it was particularly poignant time, but you feel like it’s an important and historic period to cover in the best way you possibly can, so you try and do as much as possible. Some of it’s quite difficult, because you don’t quite know how the choreography is going to play out. So often, you find yourself in the wrong place, at the wrong position. You just try and take on board as much information as you can in the run up to these events. I have no doubt that the coronation would be a huge moment of national celebration. It’s a cliché, but you do have a front row seat to the historic moment.

I’m so interested in the logistics of it all! When do you find out where you’re going to be stationed for the coronation? What if you’re like, ‘oh no, I’m not in the spot I wanted to be in’?

[Laughs] That normally happens. I mean, it’s a mix of everything. It is quite complicated—in essence, a lot of the information is learned nearer the time. Details are a closely guarded secret, the choreography of the whole event is released in the run up to the event. I have no doubt it will be a huge success. Where I will be on the day, I don’t know exactly. I’m guessing there might be a balcony moment, I’m guessing there might be some crowning events.

One of the problems, from my point of view, is logistically, it is difficult to get around. Let’s take the royal wedding of Prince William [as an example], a massive moment of national celebration. It’s difficult to move between spots. You have to choose—I was in a very limited position outside the front of Westminster Abbey, but that meant I can’t also do the kiss on the balcony picture. You can’t be everywhere, unless you have some incredible vehicle that gets you through crowds of people. There’s only limited people that can get from A to B on a day like that, because the roads are closed, the crowds are extensive. You have to pick your particular spot.

How do you pick?

For the Platinum Jubilee, Jackson was there to photograph the royals on the balcony of Buckingham Palace.

It’s the eternal problem with being a royal photographer! You have to be there to take the photo, you have to make commitments, you have to throw in a little bit of luck into the mix and hope the spots that you’re in [are good]. I try and look at these positions with ‘how much am I going to get?’ I want to get as much as I can from that particular position, as many moments and as many elements as possible. But then what you’ll probably find is from a different position, there will be a beautiful picture—maybe a standalone picture though.

These big moments are very different day to day royal photography, but they’re also exciting to be a part of. It’s more of a team event, I’d say, with everyone at Getty Images. We cover the event from all possible angles and between us as a team, we create a lovely, incredible set of images. It’s very different to me working on a one on one basis, or on day to day royal engagements. It’s quite different! But that is what I love about royal photography: Throw it all into the mix, throw that variety in, and it makes it great fun.

On days like that where, you know you’re going to be stationed outside Westminster Abbey or at Buckingham Palace, are there certain things you make sure to have with you?

Snacks! Snacks are essential. It’s a good question—for these big events, for the Queen’s funeral, I was up at 4 o’clock in the morning. For the royal wedding, 5 o’clock. You’re there for hours before. Having communication system hardwired from your camera under the road to an editing team, meaning that you can get your images out around the world as quickly as possible, that’s always a huge consideration. Take the Platinum Jubilee concert, it was very difficult to send photographs out. You have to be adept at sending from different networks and having the right communications equipment as well.

Obviously, cameras charged, the right lenses, that’s always the primary consideration. Secondary is communications equipment, the right SIM cards, the right networks. Thirdly is yourself, the right weather gear, tripods, monopods, are you wearing appropriate clothing, suit, tie, food, snacks, water—you often can’t move from the position. That’s pretty much the list, I’d say.

As you prepare for coronation Saturday, what’s your biggest anxiety going into the day?

They are nerve racking, because you have not experienced it before. That lack of knowledge! I know when I go to Royal Ascot, I’ve been going for 20 years, I know where to park, where to be what time, where I’m going to get lunch from—all those different things are really important. It’s the fear of the unknown, but also the excitement of the unknown. And certainly, excitement trumps the fear. It is really lovely being a royal photographer and your job is to be in the midst of these feel good moments, like royal birth or royal weddings. It’s not always like that, but it’s all part of the mix.

play iconThe triangle icon that indicates to play

Emily Burack (she/her) is the news writer for Town & Country, where she covers entertainment, culture, the royals, and a range of other subjects. Before joining T&C, she was the deputy managing editor at Hey Alma, a Jewish culture site. Follow her @emburack on Twitter and Instagram. 

MANILA, Philippines – German artist Boris Eldagsen won the creative competition of the open segment, one among many categories, at the 2023 Sony World Photography Awards (SWPA), with the announcement of the segment’s winners published on March 14, 2023. 

On April 13, 2023, the overall winners for the contest would be announced, and a gala was held in London, UK on April 13. 

While the contest naturally shone the spotlight on some of the world’s best photographers, Eldagsen’s winning piece “Pseudomnesia: The Electrician” has grabbed headlines, as news spreads of his work having been made, intentionally, using an AI image generator.

The news is similar to an image made through AI image generator Midjourney winning the Colorado State Fair’s annual art competition in 2023. 

Amid the coverage that various European news outlets have given the contest’s gala and the subsequent opening of the winner exhibits, Eldagsen’s blog posts have surfaced chronicling his victory, along with his subsequent refusal of the award, and what has become a testy relationship between the artist and the contest organizers.

Plea from the artist to communicate his use of AI

Eldagsen wrote on March 14, the day the winners were publicly announced, that he has been a photographer since 1989, whose “artistic focus has shifted to exploring the creative possibilities of AI generators.” 

“The work SWPA has chosen is the result of a complex interplay of prompt engineering, inpainting and outpainting that draws on my wealth of photographic knowledge,” he wrote. 

Participating in the contest, he said one of his goals is for award organizers to be aware of the differences between photographs and images (under which he categorized his winning work), and “create separate competitions for AI-generated images.” 

Among his concerns were that it wasn’t communicated in the press release that his work had been co-created using AI. 

Much earlier on March 3, a day after SWPA initially informed Eldagsen of winning, the artist wrote that he had communicated to the organizers then that he used an image generator to produce the image.

In his message to SWPA, he wrote that he told them, “Since I don’t want there to be any misunderstandings here, it is important for me to explain in this email the background of the image you have chosen in as much detail as possible…In Germany, I am active as [an] AI expert in the “Deutscher Fotorat” (German Photo Council) to discuss the chances and risks of AI image generators. Perhaps Sony would be interested in taking up the topic for a panel discussion in this context.”

The SWPA’s response to press queries

Responding at the time to press queries regarding Eldagsen’s AI image, Scott Gray, founder and CEO of the World Photography Organization was quoted in an official press statement from the organization: “As a medium, photography has always been at the forefront: constantly adapting and evolving, it has a singular ability to transform itself and push boundaries. 

“We are interested in photography as an art form, and within the Sony World Photography Awards we have our Creative categories in the Professional and Open Competitions which welcome photographers to experiment and explore the dynamism of the medium. 

“With technological advancements, a wider audience of creators are engaging with lens-based work and we look forward to seeing how this can expand the reach and impact of photography.” 

Eldagsen expressed disappointment that the organization didn’t include his own statement, stating concerns that there would be an outcry from the photography community. 

There would be several back and forth between Eldagsen and the SWPA regarding setting up a panel discussion about his use of AI image generators, but nothing materialized – likely eventually leading to his refusal to accept the award. 

Eldagsen’s refusal

Eldagsen appears to have attended the April 13 award ceremony in London, but further expressing his disappointment about not being granted a discussion about his image, he wrote, “Why didn’t they talk to me at the ceremony after I went on stage? I stayed until the end and 30 minutes longer.”

Eldagsen posted his statement refusing the award, but it is unclear if he also said these words at the actual event. Here’s his statement, with typographical errors edited for clarity:

“Thank you for selecting my image and making this a historic moment, as it is the first AI generated image to win in a [prestigious] international [photography] competition. How many of you knew or suspected that it was AI generated? Something about this doesn’t feel right, does it? AI images and photography should not compete with each other in an award like this. They are different entities. 

AI is not photography. Therefore I will not accept the award. I applied as a cheeky monkey, to find out, if the [competitions] are prepared for AI images to enter. They are not. We, the photo world, need an open discussion. A discussion about what we want to consider photography and what not. Is the umbrella of photography large enough to invite AI images to enter – or would this be a mistake? With my refusal of the award I hope to speed up this debate.

He also asked for the prize to be donated to a photo contest in Ukraine.

On Eldagsen’s work, the BBC, quoted a spokesperson from the organization behind SWPA, Creo: “The creative category of the open competition welcomes various experimental approaches to image making from cyanotypes and rayographs to cutting-edge digital practices…As such, following our correspondence with Boris and the warranties he provided, we felt that his entry fulfilled the criteria for this category, and we were supportive of his participation.” 

The organization has removed Eldagsen from the competition, and “Pseudomnesia: The Electrician” is no longer available online, among the other winning pieces. Eldagsen also said it has been removed from the physical exhibition. – Rappler.com