Creator Discuss with Fred Ritchin: “The Synthetic Eye: Photography Transformed in the Age of AI”

Ritchin, a outstanding determine in visible journalism, explores how photojournalists and visible storytellers have to rethink authenticity by way of new moral frameworks, transparency requirements, and contextual instruments that assist keep credibility in an age the place photographs may be created, not simply captured. Moderator: Professor Ken Light.

Fred Ritchin is Dean Emeritus of the International Center of Photography the place he had based the Photojournalism and Documentary Photography instructional program in 1983. He was additionally professor of Photography and Imaging at New York University from 1991-2014. Previously Ritchin served as image editor of the New York Times Magazine (1978-82) and government editor of Camera Arts journal (1982-83). He created the primary multimedia model of the New York Times newspaper in 1994-95, after which conceived and edited the Times’s first non-linear on-line documentary venture, “Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace,” nominated in 1997 for a Pulitzer Prize in public service. He additionally created the Four Corners Project, an open-source software program to offer context for images, and co-founded the present Writing with Light marketing campaign that focuses upon the integrity of the photographer as an writer.

His books on the way forward for imaging embody In Our Own Image: The Coming Revolution in Photography (Aperture, 1990), After Photography (W.W. Norton, 2008), and Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, and the Citizen (Aperture, 2013). His latest guide is The Synthetic Eye: Photography Transformed within the Age of AI, printed by Thames & Hudson in 2025. He has curated quite a few exhibitions around the globe, together with “An Uncertain Grace: The Photographs of Sebastiāo Salgado” and, as co-curator, “Mexico Through Foreign Eyes” and “In Ukraine,” and labored on numerous human rights campaigns, together with on the United Nations to finish polio globally and one other in assist of the Millennium Development Goals. He continues to show, write, and lecture extensively, together with a column on Substack, “Notes of a MetaPhotographer.”