ASMP to Adobe: Think of the Photographers
A Photography Trade Organization Misses an Opportunity

I’ve never been a member of the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP). I’ve contemplated it at turns but when I started out, membership felt prohibitive. Later on, I wasn’t sure what membership would really do for my career, as I’d already built relationships with editors and was working with people I’d wanted to.
ASMP recently released an open letter directed at software giant Adobe in response to Adobe advertisements about their generative AI imaging technology. If I were a member, I think I’d be disappointed in the letter1 from the organization that means to come to the defense of my livelihood. As I’m not, take this for what it is.
The evident reason for the open letter - fearing for the livelihood of member photographers - is well founded.
About two years ago I talked to a close friend of mine about what he made of the upcoming shift in imaging technology. He’s a creative director at a large brand and he consistently produces and attends advertising photo shoots that revolve around product images. I’ve known him since I was about thirteen. We have never worked together, we are friends who grew up skateboarding. I had no professional stake in his specific answer and he gave it to me straight.
If I recall correctly, I didn’t so much as ask - but I fed him a leading question which just betrayed my suspicions. Something along the lines of “Generative AI is really going to change how you guys make your advertising imagery, right?” His response - and I cannot remember verbatim - was something like “Oh, absolutely. And I’m sorry. We’re looking at the ability to just generate backgrounds and drop our product in there. Sure there will be some digital work, but we could be saving five or even six figures per shoot. There’s no way we’re ignoring that.” It’s not the response I wanted, but I expected it.
Now Adobe has upset photographers who use their software because they’re selling their AI technology named Firefly with taglines like “Skip the photoshoot.”2 In other words, skip the cost of commissioning original photography. I think many brands, designers and advertising agencies will be happy to oblige.
(I have to mention that at the moment, if I ran a brand that cared about good imagery, quality standards would save me from skipping the photoshoot. Firefly just isn’t good enough yet. It is better than it was a year ago, and for many purposes it will be there very soon. If you currently use Firefly to generate whole images that are supposed to take the place of real photographs for your ads you are probably running ads that look like you are trying to save money. That’s not a message that I’d want to send.)
I hope you’ll read ASMP’s letter yourself, but it’s a response that feels deflating to me. They frame the ads from Adobe as an attack on photographers, as if a large tech company would be motivated by saving the jobs of people who they don’t rely on, or no longer need to rely on. My guess is that they aren’t attacking working photographers at all, they are barely giving them a thought.
The letter goes on to address what constitutes great photography and feels like a defense of the dignity of work of the advertising or editorial photographer. This is all well and good, but I can’t see Adobe, or the market, caring. Historically, technological disruption, especially cost saving ones, have hit other sectors, there has been little regard for such things.
And here’s where I think they missed an opportunity. ASMP, an organization that represents some of the best documentary photographers past and present has an obvious reference for what AI generated imagery cannot do. AI absolutely will replace a lot of product and advertising work. This has been slowly going on for years. Extensive retouching, CGI, clone tools, healing brushes are normal tools of the trade - they are used to make products shinier and happier. These tools have almost nothing to do with documentary photography. There’s a good reason that photojournalists tend not to be Photoshop wizards.
Whatever one’s thoughts on the technology are, my current position is that it will indeed yield radical change for many industries that have historically used a lot of photography. This will impact a lot of working photographers. It will hurt some more than others, depending on the sort of work one does. It does not, as the ASMP letter claims, offer a “specter of wholesale replacement of their art and craft by AI platforms” - and I think the reasons it does not pose this threat should be self-evident to ASMP leadership. Partial replacement, sure. Significant, even.
Instead of trying to defend the dignity of the work of photographers (which is a notion I agree with), ASMP and any interested parties need to defend what photography can do that AI cannot do. This is documentary work. It seems to me that it will continue to exist and to serve a unique role as a visual medium.3 Instead, they offer a dated scold “Do Better” to a publicly traded company that probably sees very little direct financial incentive to save the job of someone who photographs products for a living, especially when compared to the growth potential of AI.
I won’t venture to predict how the market will continue to value documentary photography, but until we have a robot that can curiously traverse the world and really see and perceive like a sentient human can, the documentary photograph will be unique. That much I know. We should not conflate AI generated imagery, no matter how much it might look like a photograph, with a real documentary photograph.
We can look at this another way. Adobe’s chief strategy officer and executive vice president of design and emerging products says that generative AI is “the new digital camera.”4 I understand the spirit of his comment. But it’s off. If anything, AI is the new collage artist, the new visual remixer. But the new digital camera? A camera makes a visual record. Nothing about AI is a recording.
So I don’t disagree with the sentiment of ASMP’s letter, but I question it as a strategy. I’m not sure who it is supposed to connect with - other than to be a tiny pat on the shoulder to it’s members. I’d hate to be a member cheering on the letter for the sentiment alone, all while I still see my jobs go to the software.
Perhaps I can’t escape the conclusion because of where I am. I am writing this from my adopted home of Ann Arbor, Michigan - where Photoshop inventor Thomas Knoll hails from, and where he did his work to bring this (cost saving, disruptive, revolutionary) software to life. Down the road one way is Detroit, a city that has suffered some of the worst of fates from offshoring to cheaper labor - and only recently showing positive signs with an enthusiastic attitude of adapting to the future. Up the road the other way in smaller Michigan towns like Greenville, the main factory closed because Mexico could pay workers $1.50 an hour to make what the parent company considered to be the same thing. Electrolux and auto manufacturers didn’t save jobs because people pleaded for sympathy or talked about how hard they worked.
What ASMP wants to do is noble. But photographers should look around. No one is going to save the industry from what’s coming. It will keep changing. If I made product still life pictures - for example, I think I would have two options. I could sit there and watch it happen while I hope for the same work I’ve been used to getting even though I’m quickly becoming the slower, more expensive option, or I could be learning how I could take my eye for form, color and composition and combine it with AI, and embrace my likely new role as a computer artist.
There is a future for some photography, but AI has been and will continue to enable brands to skip the photo shoot, whether we like it or not.
I’d love to know what you think of ASMP’s response, especially if you are in the media industry. Am I being too unsympathetic? Am I missing something big? Do you think their open letter is effective? I intend to present these arguments with humility, but I implore people in my industry to see what’s coming, what is here, really, and to grapple with it.
https://www.asmp.org/press-release/an-open-letter-to-adobe/#:~:text=For%20the%20legions%20of%20photographers,Do%20better%20Adobe.
https://petapixel.com/2024/05/03/adobe-throws-photographers-under-the-bus-again-skip-the-photoshoot/
The why of this is almost a separate conversation, and I’m working on it!
https://petapixel.com/2024/05/01/adobe-exec-says-ai-is-a-revolution-and-the-new-digital-camera/