What Koudelka's Photos Show Photographers About Finding Their Voice in the Age of AI - Moments of Mood, 3.5

If you want to be a photographer for the rest of your life and actually be supported by it, you've probably asked yourself the same question I have.
With AI images, tools, and creation expanding every single day, will that still be possible?
Well, in this video, I want to show you how AI is actually going to make us more powerful storytellers, more valued for our craft, and what to double down on now so you're worth more to the industry in the future, not less.
If you're an emerging photographer somewhere in the long middle of trying to find your own voice, I want to give you something today that is not just a tip or a technique or a preset.
I want to give you a practice, a way of sitting with your own work that over the next 10 minutes or so might just loosen that quiet worry I think a lot of us are carrying right now.
Now, in May this year, a company that makes photo editing software, Visco, put a single sentence in front of every photographer it could reach.
Your eye, the way you see the world, cannot be generated.
It cannot be prompted.
It is irreplaceable.
And it landed with me initially, naturally, like a bit of relief.
I mean, the real impact of AI is obviously on a lot of our minds, not just as artists, but as humans throughout society, that fear of the uncertain.
I'm sitting with one of my photographs today, and I made it in a place that is quietly disappearing.
And I keep returning to it because it seems to know something about my voice that I think I keep forgetting.
And as such, I am drawn back to this place time and time again.
By the end of this episode, I want you to be holding a frame like it in your own mind, the one that is still unmistakably yours, even on the days your voice feels broken into a hundred pieces by everyone else's opinions or your thoughts.
But to get there, we have to start with why that reassuring little sentence felt so good and what it quietly gives away.
I'm not going to answer that yet, though.
This is the Mood Podcast.
I'm Matt Jacob, and this is the show that helps emerging photographers find their voice so that you can build a cohesive body of work, articulate what it's about, and get it in front of the right people.
It's the only photography podcast that is itself a practice.
Every week I sit down with a guest or break down a single idea in a commentary just like this one called Moments of Mood.
Either way, we just slow down and turn one idea over in the hand until it shows us something about how we see and who we are becoming as artists.
Two questions sit underneath everything I'm going to say today.
The first, why did we need a company to tell us that our own eye was actually worth something?
And the second, and the one that I guess gives me a little bit more comfort, what if your eye was never yours to begin with?
And what if that turns out to be the best news you have heard all year?
I'll explain.
But before we go any further, sit still with me for half a minute.
Wherever you are, bring to mind one image you have made.
Not your most liked, not your best performing, the one you would still have made if you knew no one would ever see it.
Picture it now and notice that you do not have to defend it to anyone here.
There is no number underneath it in this room.
There is only you and the thing you saw and the fact that you were the one who saw it.
Hold it there because we're going to come back to it.
Now, let me name the worry because it is real and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
Images can now be conjured out of nothing.
We've all seen it.
Infinite, instant, costless almost.
Brands that used to hire photographers are generating what they need instead.
The platforms we built our names on bury our best work beneath whatever is trending that morning or afternoon.
And somewhere in the back of the room, there is always a voice.
Sometimes other people's, of course, sometimes our own, asking whether any of this is still worth doing.
So I look back at this one photograph I made from a place I won't name because it's precious to me and a world I want to keep as fiction, actually.
And I admit the machine could approximate it now.
It could render the light, the dust, the composition, the texture.
What it could not do though is be there.
I was the one standing in that heat, invited to that moment, carrying whatever I carried into it.
All of my thoughts, fears, worries, hopes, and desires.
My physical exhaustion, the games in my head, the external pressures of time, people, light and environment, and of course, so much more.
And here is the part I kept turning over.
The same company that told us our I cannot be generated also builds the tools that generate.
It runs a whole lab of artificial intelligence.
Its own research found that an overwhelming number of photographers already use these tools every single day.
And woven throughout the very pages of that reassuring campaign are invitations to subscribe.
Now, I'm not saying this to attack them or to demonstrate a paradox because I use that app and I love it.
But I think the sentiment is probably sincere.
And I'm saying that because it reveals something.
The reassurance is also a transaction.
The comfort is also a product.
And if comfort about your own worth has become something that can be sold back to you, we have to ask who first convinced you that you needed to buy it.
So here is what I have come to believe.
The crisis is not artificial intelligence.
The crisis is that the sentence your eye cannot be replaced felt like rescue.
And rescue is only sweet to someone who's already drowning.
We were drowning long before machines arrived.
We had slowly handed the verdict on our own work to everything outside ourselves.
The likes, the algorithms, the client's nod, the small gray number underneath the picture.
If you are an emerging photographer and your voice feels fragmented, like it changes shape depending on who is looking, this is the reason.
You are carrying a dozen judges in your head, if not more, and not one of them is you.
Artificial intelligence is simply the newest judge whose approval we are terrified of losing.
Now, when I look at this frame, the reason it still feels unmistakably mine is almost embarrassingly simple.
I made it for no verdict but my own.
In August of 1968, Soviet tanks rolled into Prague.
Kadelka was 30.
He was not a news photographer, he had never photographed anything you could call an event.
He photographed theater and the Roma communities of his own country quietly, for no one but himself.
And then the tanks came into his city, and something in him simply had to lift the camera.
His exact words, it was my country.
I took these photographs for myself, not for a magazine.
It was only by chance that they were actually published.
I knew it was important to photograph, so I photographed.
Wonderful.
Now, those negatives were smuggled out under the name of an unknown Czech photographer, because if he had been identified, he could have been imprisoned or worse, right?
Now he won one of the most prestigious awards in the medium and could not tell a soul the pictures were his.
For 16 years, he carried that silence.
And it did not diminish the work by a single degree, because the worth of those photographs was never out there.
It lived in him.
And that is what I'm after in this one frame.
Not to be Kadelka, of course, but to remember that the seeing was the thing, not the applause.
A machine can render the smoke and the crowd or whatever it is, but what it cannot be is the witness.
And I want to say one thing right here in the middle and then just get it out of the way.
Relearning to trust your own eye is almost impossible to do alone because everything around you is built to keep you looking outward for the verdict.
That is the thing that fragments a voice in the first place.
So I made a room where the scoreboard is switched off and it's called Mood Insiders.
It's a community, and people there ask what you saw, not how you performed.
If your voice feels scattered, this is the room where it slowly gathers back into one.
That's all I'll say about it.
Now, I'm not going to pretend the fear underneath all of this stuff evaporates just because a Czech man was brave in 1968.
So let me say it out loud, the real one, the one at two in the morning.
What if my eye is ordinary?
What if I am not bearing witness to anything and I'm just photographing the same coastline or whatever it is as everyone else?
What if the machine really is good enough now and the world quietly stops needing what I make and my voice never gathers into anything whole?
I've sat in that myself more than once.
Now let me be here for a moment, because the comfort I'm about to offer is worthless if I rush you out of the fear before you have felt it.
Here is the first thing I have come to believe, and it begins as something almost embarrassingly practical.
Real photography is about to become more valuable, not less.
When something becomes infinite, it becomes cheap.
We are about to be buried under even bigger avalanche of images that cost nothing, that no one lived, that no one stood in the heat for, that no one returned to a disappearing place three times or four or five to make.
And against that flood, a frame like this one or yours, with actual experience inside it becomes rare.
People feel the difference even when they cannot name it, and they reach for the real thing because the human heart has always hungered for what is true.
The work that costs a person something is becoming scarce.
And scarcity in the end is value.
But I think there's something larger moving underneath the economics, and it is the part I find genuinely helpful.
There's a phrase going around now coined by a man named Stephen Johnson and used by writers like Sam Harris.
It's the revenge of the humanities.
For a generation, we were all told that the safe future belonged to the technical, the coded, the automatable, and that the artists and the writers and the people who study the human soul were indulging something quaint.
And now the machine has arrived and quietly swallowed exactly the work we were told was safe.
What it cannot swallow is the rest, the taste, the judgment, the lived understanding of why a thing matters.
The voice that arrives at a conclusion that is genuinely its own rather than the most plausible or predictable average of everything anyone else has already said.
Even the people building these systems are saying it out loud.
Daniela Amade, who co-founded one of the largest AI companies in the world, Anthropic, studied literature, and she has said the things that make us human will become much more important.
That studying the humanities now matters more than ever.
Sit with how strange and how reassuring that is.
For decades, the market treated your sensibility, your eye, your years of quiet looking as a soft and unserious thing.
The machine is about to make it the most valuable thing you own.
Not because you can outproduce it, of course you can't, but because you can do the one thing it will never do.
You can mean it.
This is why I am not afraid for this photograph.
A thousand synthetic versions of this place could exist by tonight, and not one of them will have been there.
Not one will carry a single hour that was actually lived.
And in a world drowning in images that no one lived, the one that was lived becomes the only one worth looking at twice.
So here it is what I want to say to you plainly, as the emerging photographer I am actually talking to.
Go deeper, not louder.
Deeper.
Find the voice that is yours and follow it past the point where it is comfortable.
Because in amongst the noise, in amongst the endless AI slop scrolling past every thumb on earth, the one thing people are starving for and will be more so is a human being that saw something and meant it.
We want to hear your voice.
We are going to need it more than we ever have.
Do not go quiet at the exact moment the world is finally desperate for the real.
But the practical comfort is not the one that I think is actually liberating.
Kodelka, late in his life after the tanks and the exile, said something that has not left me.
One world is disappearing.
I'm trying to photograph what is left.
I've always been drawn to what is ending, to what will soon no longer exist.
I do not go there to prove I am irreplaceable.
I gave that up.
I go because the seeing moves through me when I am there, the way it moves through anyone who slows down enough to look.
And that is the thing I want to hand to you.
Your eye was never a possession.
It was never something you could own or lose or have stolen by a machine.
It moves through you whenever you stop and pay attention.
You cannot lose what you never owned, which means you can finally stop gripping it, stop proving it, stop measuring whether your work is original enough or seen enough to justify the years you have given to it.
Those were never the industry's rules.
They were the ones we wrote for ourselves, and we are allowed to put them down.
Let me gather this into three things that we can carry out.
Number one, the concern, and in some places, worry or even panic was never really about the machines.
It was about how much of your own worth you had already handed away long before they arrived.
Number two, the work that costs a human being something is becoming rare, and rare things gain value.
You do not have to win that argument because the market makes it for you.
Number three, and this is the one I want you to really try and remember: your eye was never a possession.
It was never yours to own or to lose.
It moved through you whenever you slow down and look hard enough.
So you can stop defending the imperfect frame.
It is okay that the work is not perfect.
It just is.
And that is the freedom.
Here is the reflection I'm leaving in your hands, the one that I will probably be sitting with myself as I move forward and get on with my life.
Go and find the single photograph that is unmistakably yours.
Not your best, yours.
The one you would still have made if the internet had never existed.
Look at it without defending it to anyone and ask what it already knows about your voice that you have been too scattered or too busy or too afraid of the verdict to hear.
That frame is not fragmented.
You are not fragmented.
You only forgot which judge to listen to, and it was always the one looking through your lens.
It is okay that your eye was never yours.
That was never the loss.
That was always the freedom.
And it was never theirs to take.
So now we can see how AI is going to make you a more powerful storyteller and more valuable as a photographer.
But how do you actually develop your self-awareness so you can capture those truly human moments before they pass?
Well, check this video out where we go into the hidden psychology behind your photography.
And I'll see you in the next one.
Happy shooting.