5th August 2026

A check-in with the one and only Bruce Gilden, whose full podcast episode was released back in July 2018. We talk about his current solo exhibition, Why These?, at Fotografiska in Berlin (until August 23rd), getting close vs. being comfortable, being selective, rooting for the underdog, finding his subjects beautiful and the devil being in the detail.

Here’s a short taster. To hear more, sign up as a member from £4 per month here.

And last week’s guest Lorenzo Meloni returns to answer the bonus questions.

How do you feel about the emergence of AI on the world of image-making, and what impact do you think it might have on photography and photographers?

Okay… So I think that the impact of artificial intelligence on photography, it’s really minor compared to the impact of artificial intelligence in general. The thing that there is a tool that is able to generate an image, it doesn’t concern me as photographer, in the sense it doesn’t worry me. to a certain degree, I’m also happy because, it, finally disconnect this idea that a picture is a truth.

So it does two things that are interesting. It creates this disconnection that a picture is not reality. Second thing, it makes me question more what I’m looking at. So there is still, again, the question, is it true? Is it a lie, what I’m looking at? Is it generated? Is it real? And if it’s real, what does it mean?

And I will add the third thing, which is that authorship becomes more important because I have to question the source of this image. so I think like the source of the image becomes, again, important. So these are things, there are three things that can be like, somehow positive about AI.

What worries me about artificial intelligenc that I don’t hear so much speaking about, it’s that now we are having a lot of access, knowledge, centralized in the hands of few people. Yeah. And everything is getting more and more centralized, like a system of payment, system of images, system of representation, knowledge, intelligence, because it is an intelligence that you pay for having access to. And we are not questioning the open source model. So all of us basically is subscribing to models that we pay. These people actually they are using our knowledge, our way of thinking, our way of imagining the world to refine their model and we, as the people, are not imagining, alternatives.

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