As a group, we travelled to St. Malo to test our abilities using Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” technique, taking part in live street photography throughout the town for the day.

I ended up taking hundreds of images over the 5 or so hours we spent there, covering different areas such as the castle walls, the restaurants, and narrow alleyways, most of which captured the bustling community at St. Malo at its peak.

Once I’d sorted through the larger half of the photos, I gave my best-unedited photographs a star rating on Lightroom Classic, only keeping the highest-rated images for editing.

After editing a small portion of the photographs, I was already left with a wide range of compositions that a few I believe capture the concept of the “decisive moment” perfectly, and imitate Cartier-Bresson’s style. I think this trip was a great opportunity to take a large amount of images that I’m definitely going to be using for projects in the future, and a chance to develop my skills and really focus on my weaknesses in photography.

‘Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as a piece of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire’. Susan Sontag (1971), On Photography

Photography has been around for many years since 1839, and has only developed more and more over the years. Many take photography as a glimpse of life, a small snap shot of someone’s life or their day, however it could tell a completely different story to what the actual scene was like. This is where we begin to wonder whether photographs can lie or not. Many people realised that photography was a very different approach to art as opposed to traditional art forms and captures more realistic moments. Traditional art like paintings and drawing have been around for many many years, with the first painting known having been made over 40,000 years ago. This make the technique very sentimental to some and also historically valuable. With photography being introduced it may feel as if the world if moving on and becoming more influenced by technology which people may not like. I think to some people this may be seen as a less valuable way to produce art than traditional art as it isn’t ourselves who have created it physically as well as it being a newer medium which people will always be sceptical about. Photography is also seen as being an illusion to many people as it is a frozen image of a moment in time that is only a snap shot memory. Many people don’t like the idea of this as it doesn’t show the full story and it only one specific perspective or angle of the actually scenario. For this exact reason many people find it deceiving and hard to comment on. In more modern days, as photography has become very popular and accepted partially, I believe that traditional art work and photography can coexist and even work together to develop further.

AI in photography has become largely used in recent years. It is the use of artificial intelligence technology to generate realistic images from a few words or to adapt original images to enhance specific parts etc. Whilst it can be used simply to help photographers improve the quality of their images or to try out different ways to edit them, it can also be used negatively because of its realistic outcomes. As AI is becoming more and more developed it has also created quite an up roar with many different people for obvious reasons.

Above we can see an image which was taken in 1936 of a loyalist soldier who sadly passed away. To some people this image may seem staged or unrealistic, however, this image is completely real and was just taken at the exact moment the soldier was shot. The photographer had asked some of the soldiers to go out onto the field to ‘fake’ getting shot for some images, when all of a sudden the enemies took advantage and the soldier I the image was actually shot with Capa capturing it at the perfect time. Whilst this image is real it could be easily staged which is why many people doesn’t believe in many images as it is so easy to do or to edit these days to give the viewer one idea when the actually story is completely different. One of the few things that to me makes the image seem more real is the framing and focus of the image. When staging an image we may put the subject in the middle of the frame, however, in this image we can see that the soldier is off the the left hand side. Part of the soldier is also not in focus which is one of the key thing many photographers aim for, focus. As the soldier is moving it would have made it hard for Capa to produce a focused image whether it was staged or not especially back in the time that it was produced, however, I do think this adds to it.

In this second image we can immediately see a difference. It looks much more digital and almost more like a very realistic painting as opposed to a photograph. Whilst this may be because it is a much newer image and photography without AI has deeply developed since, it almost looks too realistic to be true. there are a couple things in this image that I find give it away. I think that the burgers don’t look realists because of the way that they are stacked and they look as if they are plastic or another material rather than food. In the background we can see another employee who appear to have no face/ doesn’t look like a human. Whilst AI is very advanced it doesn’t always go according to plan which to me is a big give away to this image. However that single part of the image could have been edited whilst the rest isn’t etc. Finally, I think that ‘Trumps’ skin on his arms doesn’t look very realistic and again look almost like plastic. With that being said, the image still looks as if it could be real and just edited to improve the quality. This allows us to understand why people mistake Ai generated images for real images creating dispute.

Overall, I think that AI can be very deceiving and misleading causing people to interpret images in the wrong way. I think that images that are staged are a great example of how photography can lie as it is a mind game. They make the viewer think one thing but behind the scenes are completely different At the end of the day, I think it all comes down to how you perceive images differently and what we each take from them. Everyone will always have something else to say about an image or their own opinion to add as photographs are a very open style of art allowing the viewer to add their own thoughts to it. Not only do I think that images generated from AI can lie, but also regular images can too, as ultimately they are only a snap shot of a much bigger movie.