• Terence Tempest, 70, said firm was ‘heartbroken’ and offer was ‘unacceptable’

By Ben Endley and Elena Salvoni

Published: 21:59 EDT, 29 March 2024 | Updated: 22:12 EDT, 29 March 2024

Questions are urgently being asked over who is to blame for the proposed editing out of disabled children from school photos, with a boss of the photography firm at the centre of the scandal insisting ‘it is not company policy.’

Terence Tempest, 70, was unable to explain why parents had been given the option – as he vowed to investigate how the fiasco came to be.

He revealed ‘heartbroken’ bosses were locked in crisis meetings to discover ‘what the hell happened’, and described the suggestion to delete children with complex needs from the class pictures as ‘unacceptable’.

Families were left ‘devastated’ after three children at Aboyne Primary School in Scotland were removed from images sent via an internet link, giving parents the option to order a photo without them in it.

The revelations have sparked widespread outrage, including from Scotland’s first minister, Humza Yousaf, who last night described the incident at the Aberdeen school as ‘really dreadful’. 

Speaking from his £3m riverside home near Falmouth, Cornwall, Mr Tempest said: ‘We’re heartbroken. We have released a statement but at the moment I’m just trying to find out what stimulated this and what the hell happened.

‘It’s just unacceptable, I don’t know what’s happened. It’s certainly not a policy of ours.

‘We had a crisis meeting this morning, we are having another one this afternoon.’

Asked whether he would apologise to the families involved, Mr Tempest said: ‘Of course I understand how upset the families must be, I would be too.

‘If I was in that position I would want an apology. I don’t run the company and I’m in touch with the managing director at the moment and they will decide what to do.’

Mr Tempest was unable to explain why parents were given the option to choose photos without children with additional support needs and says the freelance photographer may have decided to do it. 

He said: ‘I’m not sure what the current policy is frankly, it depends what we are asked to do. We just respond to what we are asked for.

‘We have got another meeting coming up and will find out whether the photographer was asked to do it. Did they do it off their own back?’

Businesswoman mother-of-two Natalie Pinnell, 38, told MailOnline the decision to omit her nine-year-old daughter Erin from her class photo had ‘devastated’ their family.

She described the decision taken by Cornwall-based Tempest Photography as ‘inhumane’ and said her child had been ‘erased from history’.

Ms Pinnell said: ‘You can’t erase them because they’re inconvenient. It’s just not OK.

‘It’s devastating to have your child be erased from a photo or give parents a choice whether she should or should not be included. 

‘She is the most beautiful human being. Who could do this?

‘I’m grateful that she’s not aware of it because the damage that would do to her self-esteem would be devastating.  

‘But I’m having to tell my other daughter about what’s happening to her sister. I’m not sure I’m going to sleep tonight.’

Natalie, who runs a business management and strategy company in Aboyne, said she was left fuming after she got an email from the school with two photo links – one that included her daughter and one that didn’t. 

Another class that had a disabled girl in a wheelchair also had two photos – one with the schoolgirl and one without.

Natalie added: ‘I queried it with the school and they queried it with the photographer. He said ”yes, that’s what we have done.”

‘It’s been the most traumatic experience as a family that we have felt.

‘I really wanted to believe there was a different reason. I was trying to look for a reason why someone would have made that decision.

‘We have mourned. We have hurt. I feel like I haven’t even hit the bottom of my shock. It’s been absolutely devastating.

‘The worst part was when I was talking to a friend about what happened and she found that there were two links for her daughter.’

Natalie said the school, which has a dedicated additional needs hub, had vowed never to use the company again.

She added: ‘It has been a hard thing to process as a family. As a mum I want to champion her, and to have people thinking she is erasable is just devastating beyond belief.

‘To give parents a choice whether or not to include one individual child because she doesn’t fit in with it all is beyond comprehension.’

Natalie wasn’t the only mother outraged by the shocking decision.

Lisa Boyd’s nine-year-old daughter Lily Nicolson, who has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair, was also omitted from one of the class photos, along with another boy. 

She said: ‘This is clear discrimination and shouldn’t happen in a school or anywhere.

‘It is the worst that Lily has been treated in her entire life. The school is so inclusive, Lily is included in everything the school does.

‘Her twin sister, Iona, is in a different class and I only got one photo for that class but I got two for Lily’s – one without my kid in it. It’s horrendous.’

Another outraged mother Natalie Wild, 45, also revealed toay how a photographer from the same company asked her daughter Tilly who has serious eyesight problems to take off her thick glasses for a picture. 

Ms Wild, a commercial property developer, said the request made her daughter feel ‘vulnerable and scared’ as she relies on her 17 times magnification glasses, and considers them to be part of her.

She complained to the company after the incident in September 2022 when Tilly was in Year One at the Immaculate Conception Catholic Primary School in Spinkhill, Derbyshire.

But after she was told that it should not have happened, another photographer from the firm made the same request to her daughter on the company’s return to the school to take annual pictures last September.

The company says it is investigating.

The First Minister was asked about the reports as he visited a soft play centre in Cumbernauld. He said it was ‘shameful, really dreadful’.

He told the PA news agency: ‘It should never have happened at all.

‘I don’t want to see another single example of that anywhere in Scotland. It’s not acceptable, not right.

‘And I’m pleased the council responsible has apologised.’

How do we reconnect ourselves with the essence of nature? How do we celebrate its beauty in our daily life? These are the key messages behind the work of the Qatari photographer Azzam Al Mannai. His magnificent pictures of whale sharks and wildlife are renowned around the world.

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Qatar’s natural beauty is no secret to Azzam Al Mannai. The self-taught wildlife photographer has spent the last four summers diving with whale sharks hundreds of kilometres away from the country’s shore. The giant mammals have become an integral part of his artwork.

The 44-year-old Qatari artist spent fifteen years in the oil and gas industry before changing his career path. The engineer then became the CEO of Sports Accelerator, an organisation hub for sports incubators. It wasn’t until 2019 that Azzam decided to dedicate more time to his hobbies and first picked up a camera.

A solo trip to Iceland marked a pivotal moment in Azzam’s life. Getting up close to wildlife inspired him to immortalise the scenes. He threw himself into learning photography and developing his skills.

Off the coast of Qatar, Azzam’s images of the largest gathering of whale sharks in the world garnered international acclaim. Just over four years later, his photographs of 200 hundred mammals swimming together were featured in National Geographic and Netflix.

“When I take a picture, I always try to ensure that it has this sort of soul momentum in it, that it is not just a rigid picture. I see my work as communicating with the audience, not only through the visualisation, but also through key messages”, Azzam told the Dialogue.

Azzam Al Mannai is truly inspirational, he has swam tiger sharks, orcas, stingrays, and sperm whales all over the globe. On dry land, he’s photographed gorillas in Rwanda and expanded his portfolio to include humans too. Next on his bucket list are North India, Amazonia, and Patagonia, where he plans to capture snow leopards, jaguars, and pumas in their natural habitat.

On March 19th, The International Center for Photography (ICP) hosted Seeing Meaning: From Pictographs to AI. A symposium sponsored by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and broadly organized—as stated in the promotional materials—around the “intersections between image and language,” the event featured an earnestly eclectic roster of speakers eager to probe this liminal space. One played a saxophone. Another read an autofiction-adjacent account of his experience with photography and psychoanalysis. Charles Broskoski—co-founder and CEO of Are.na (an artsy, pseudo-erudite cousin of Pinterest)—live-blogged the event. The program’s curator Marina Chao thanked those in attendance for coming out “on a school night.” In the face of a wider, hotly contested societal debate about AI, the day maintained a whimsical, academic vibe.

Yet, a sober opening presentation by Fred Ritchin couldn’t help but color the more artistic and theoretical speeches that followed. “Exiting the Photographic Universe” was a nihilistic account of photojournalism in the wake of text-to-image AI algorithms. Ritchin, dean emeritus of the ICP and a former NYU professor of photography, has for decades focused on documenting human rights abuse. As such, it was disturbing when he claimed that the age of photography was dead. It was even more disturbing when he claimed its death ushered in a world where human rights abuses can not be reliably documented and therefore believed. “We’ve overwritten the photograph,” he said. In a world where around 40 percent of people cannot distinguish between artificial and real people, there will be no more iconic pictures like Tiananmen Square’s “Tank Man.”

To underscore this point, he cited Amnesty International’s use of AI to depict the 2021 protests in Colombia. Even reputable organizations have begun to utilize synthetic images. Adobe—ironically the head of the Content Authenticity Initiative—was caught selling fake depictions of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. Ritchin along with Dr. Yotam Ophir—a political science professor at the University at Buffalo who spoke after him—continued to show viral, AI-generated renderings of allegedly dead Israeli and Palestinian children. These images are deeply troubling and, at first glance, realistic. They’ve also been viewed millions of times. With or without a noble cause, anyone can now produce passable, engaging visual evidence in support of their ideas. We now have photos that can “prove” anything, be it for or against Palestine, Trump’s huge Black voter turnout, or Pope Francis’ uncharacteristic ownership of a Moncler-style puffer jacket.

Evidence is a thing of the past when it is faked.

Photographed by Gabrielle Ravet.

Uncritically, the public hungrily consumes AI images. It seems odd that, amid an incredibly well-documented genocide, these “photos” can still find footing when there is already real, photographic evidence of the same subject matter. Something about the generated photos, even in the face of documented realities, is enticing.

Maybe it’s because of the uncannily fluid, almost painted quality the images have. They’re certainly eye-catching. Regardless, Ritchin has been sounding the alarm on doctored images since the ’80s—before Photoshop, much less DALL-E, existed. Dr. Ophir noted that talented editors with enough skill and time on their hands have always been able to generate believable fake images. Those, too, have been peddled by major, legacy news organizations—from Reuters to the LA Times.

Regardless, there are a few obvious reasons this new crop of image-generating AIs are uniquely scary. First, they poison the well, making any evidence subject to scrutiny. Now, in the public imagination, the camera’s (somewhat) objective lens has been replaced by an infinitely manipulatable algorithm. Artificial intelligence also means doctored images are much quicker and easier to make. But, there’s a more subtle conceptual, structural, and linguistic departure none of the speakers explicitly mentioned.

GANs (the most popular image generative models) craft their output from Gaussian noise: Pure visual nonsense. Over small increments, this TV-static-esque gibberish becomes clearer, eventually resulting in the classic (almost) photorealistic results. The algorithm can take random pixels (imagine a grayish soup) and tweak their values, de-noising their aggregate. In practice, this means the picture volleys back and forth between a generator (makes/adjusts the pixels) and a discriminator (an algorithm that, having looked at many images, determines whether an image is satisfactory) until it’s deemed realistic and close enough to the prompt.

This structure means that, in the beginning, however, there’s only the textual prompt and the visual nothingness. Whereas language traditionally seeks to distill experience into a linear representation system, in the generative case, linguistic representation precedes the image. The specter of language, and as a result, an authorial viewpoint, lurks behind each of the GAN’s products. Structured language has subjects, objects, and narrative forces driving it. Syntactically, prompts have clear-cut meaning. They’re spelled out.

“With text-to-image AI, this repression achieves its totalizing aim. Language becomes the basis for pictographic representation.”

With such straightforward meaning behind each of the GANs’ images, there was a discordance with the research presented by Dr. Maria Varkanitsa, a linguist and neuroscientist studying patients suffering from stroke-induced language issues. In one of her tests, she shows her patients a line drawing of a cat and a mouse. There are two ways to describe the image: the cat is chasing the mouse or the mouse is being chased by the cat. When shown the drawing, healthy minds can communicate both linguistic points of view. Ideally, one can extrapolate nuance and subjectivity from situations and the images used to represent them. Yet, in programmatically generated images the description precedes the representation. An image of a cat chasing a mouse and an image of a mouse being chased by a cat are, in a neural network, different. Encoded at their genesis is an explicit and legible perspective that the prompt—and as a result, the image—seeks to express. It’s not difficult to reverse-engineer the input from the output.

Images have always framed their subjects, unable to escape their creator’s bias. In 1994’s The Vision Machine, theorist Paul Virilio identifies the flattening of lived experience into a 2D frame as a rhetorical device, smashing together space and time. In his conception of the photograph, there is a totalitarian ambition to repress the invisible, hidden by the borders of the frame. With text-to-image AI, this repression achieves its totalizing aim. Language becomes the basis for pictographic representation. A significant structural shift, the invisible is no longer restrained, it is rendered non-existent. The generative gaze is myopic and inward. Each image has a singular, god-like speaker. Underneath the image is only one concept, already named.

With the AI images of Gaza Rithin and Dr. Ophir reference, we see children’s exaggerated pleading eyes. Some have Palestinian flags painted on their bodies. The same is true for their Israeli counterparts. Cloyingly, any messiness or harsh ambiguity is erased. With clear textual backing, they are, despite their disturbing content, easy to read conceptually. Rather than showing the reality of the horror in Gaza, AI can make a simple, convincing rhetorical case. Compounding this legibility is the dataset on which it’s trained. As a machine raised solely on existing images, its imagination is limited. Algorithms cannot conceptualize novelty (and thus situational nuance) because there is no precedent in which they could. The uniquely disturbing reality found in Gaza has collapsed into each preceding humanitarian crisis, as exemplified by whoever feeds a DALL-E or the like a written prompt. Traditional photography attempts to capture real, inhabited lives (with their differences, foibles, and unintelligibility), forcing the viewer to confront the human on the other side of the lens. Although not always dissimilar to reality, text-to-image AI restates a simple prompt. Limited by length and complexity, they can only convey so much.

The same textual forces that make AI photojournalism so reductive make AI art so mushy and unprovocative. Writer and photographer Nicholas Mulner prefaces his presentation, admitting, “Despite holding the urgent concern for AI imagery, I found myself easily bored by the discourses around artificial intelligence, art, and photography.” Later in the day, conceptual artist Chloë Bass staged a piece (“To Quote, To Praise, To Summon”) she originally performed at the MoMA last November. Asking for audience engagement, one elderly woman explained that when she first encountered photography years ago, it challenged her, encouraging her to empathize with emotions she’d never felt before. It’s difficult to imagine that AI art could provide that challenge.

As the symposium’s focus progressed from photojournalism to artistic practice, Chao’s argument became clearer: at their best, when images and language come into contact, they are disruptive forces.

JJJJJerome Ellis, another speaker, manipulates typography to represent his stutter as a challenge to normative language systems. A totalizing force itself, traditional syntax erases his speech patterns. Freeing the letter from the line and repeating characters, he advocates for his stutter’s communicative importance. In The Clearing (a book that transcribes an album, pictured below), he writes a poem dedicated to the disfluency of speech, interspersing stanzas with dozens of D’s, repeated like a keyboard smash. A disruption to normative cultural forces, his practice is antithetical to the syntactically fluent, smoothed-over, ethos AI models embody.

JJJJJerome Ellis, The Clearing. Photographed by Justin Lubliner.

Entering non-traditional text like JJJJJerome’s into DALL-E does not create any meaningful visual accompaniment. It glitches—AI is not designed to create meaning outside of existing systems of knowledge. It first balks at the repeated letters, eventually giving a nondescript, unrelated image of outer space. Prompts must be linear and immediately accessible—his words are not. But, as he says, disruptions open new ways of thinking. They provoke thought. Unsure what to do, despite it having no relevance to the text, the program goes the linguistically literalist route, invoking the great unknown: a picture of space.

Many of the other artists shared his experimental, tradition-irreverent ethos. Shannon Ebner presented “HYPER-GRAPHIC-STATES,” showcasing her work recording sounds through experimental mediums: poetry spoken through a trumpet, capturing “sounds” in jars, hydrophone recording visualizations, et al; her experiments drew out the manner in which our current ways of recording impact our interactions with an environment and others. Finnegan Shannon and Bojana Coklyat looked to HTML image alt-text (an often utilitarian device) as a poetic medium; their work investigated the way technical design affects the experience of those with limited sight on the internet. Jennifer Daniel, chair of the Unicode Consortium’s Emoji Subcommittee, discussed the modularity of her pictographs and the manifold meaning encoded in their combinations; a new pictographic language with no rules, users have become creative with expressing less easily translated ideas. One of her favorites is .

Seeing Meaning attempted to peek through the cracks of graphic representation. In disjoint unions, the limitations of our technology (whether it be language or sophisticated digital algorithms) is able to be seen, and as a result, interrogated. On the other hand, with AI images namely dispensed through corporate programs like DALL-E or Microsoft’s Image Creator, textual prompts, social conditions, and the resulting synthetic output have a 1:1:1 perfect conceptual overlap. Producing ideologically consistent and ultra-decipherable ur-images, it’s impossible—unless pushed to their breaking point (Jon Rafman’s recent work comes close)—for text-based GANs to produce meaningful critique. Usually, however, it is a perfect, consistent reverberation of the user’s input, if the prompt is simple enough. The machine seeks to create its output from uncritically legible texts that affirm the status quo and the user’s POV. Seeing Meaning’s lineup had no interest in that.

Ah, I remember COVID – the pandemic that saw us wearing masks, sitting at home with “un” loved ones, walking the dog while taking the fear of death in our stride, or trying to pass the time with new hobbies (some of which have turned into full-scale habits). I refuse to mention my sim racing habit and the money (I don’t have) that I spent on it. Whoops.

The impact of the socially distancing flu was immeasurable. Production seemed to stop on just about everything, and no marketing money was being spent either. Well, that was true for a while, until marketing and the challenge of working from home seemed to figure out how to get work done.

What changed for the photographer was that large projects seemed to dry up. Shipping a photographer by plane from point A to B became more difficult, and the cost of any production was higher (assuming someone was willing to come into contact with other people at all). Moreover, the restrictions on some businesses opening to support production were also a massive hurdle to overcome.

Marketing departments then figured out that they could hire local (cheaper) photographers to do the job, and said photographers were more willing to take the risks. Branding went “local”, so to speak. Budgets that were tight then became a bit more fluid and, as time went by, the benefit of going local seemed to help the budgets go further than before. Why pay one photographer when you can get two and generate twice as much, with less? Productions went from large to micro.

COVID is now being lived with, we understand its impact, and time has moved on. Marketing departments have moved on and learned, too, and carried on in the direction of hiring locals to do the work they otherwise would have used a conventional process for pre-COVID. So much so that my favorite studio in Brooklyn closed down, as it just couldn’t maintain the costs and loss of income, and it’s not alone. Many of my peers have struggled to keep their commercial businesses going. A few have thrived, of course, as they have been in the right place to benefit from the “local” effect.

As the photography and content industry seems to be divided, with the haves and have-nots, the script is getting flipped with those working and making money, but the income is nowhere near pre-pandemic levels. I understand that things changed, but the industry does seem to race to the bottom on price in nearly every genre and sector – and if the locals think they are doing great, well, yes they are, but they are also being exploited.

I do wish there was some kind of regulation for the photography industry, a governing body if you will. Almost like a kind of trade licensing program that helps protect the industry as a whole. Maybe that’s overkill, and who wants more red tape? I think I would welcome it.

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The world is taking more photos than ever before. In fact, it’s estimated that since 2015, more photographs are snapped each year than the combination of every previous year since the invention of the camera. That still doesn’t mean that you can snap a pic just anywhere, however.

Even in 2024, there are still public places that are not allowed to be photographed. Whether it’s due to permits, integrity of the democratic system, or even national security, there are several New York locations that ban the public from taking pictures.

Can You Take a Picture in a Voting Booth in New York State?

One of the most popular photography questions surprisingly revolves around selfies in voting booths (remember when Justin Timberlake got in trouble in 2016?). While plenty of states don’t mind voters snapping a pic, New York State does not allow photography “showing a completed ballot or indicating how [they] cast their vote”.

Can You Take Photographs of Railroad Tracks in New York State?

New York State’s railroad system, both historic and modern, is often the subject of photographers across the state. While taking shots of trains from public land is allowed, any activity on train tracks or other private property is strictly prohibited. Countless outreach programs stress the message that any train track, no matter how empty they seem, can turn deadly in seconds.

Can You Take Photographs at Famous New York City Parks?

Causal photographs (on a phone or handheld camera) are allowed in nearly every public area of New York City, but there are certain guidelines in city parks. For instance, no professional photography of any kind is allowed at The Cloisters, and taking shots with a tripod at Grand Central Station requires a permit (most photography, including professional, is allowed without a permit in Central Park). Find the full list of requirements here.

Of course, photography on any private property is subject to the owner’s discretion. Guidelines for trash, however, are universal no matter where the can is located. Take a look at some New York guidelines below.