‘Photography Is not Dying’ Says VSCO

In a world the place images software program firms don’t all the time give images or photographers the respect they deserve, VSCO has dedicated to the significance of images.

“Photography isn’t dying,” VSCO says. “It’s never mattered more.”

VSCO has launched a brand new U.S. model marketing campaign at what the corporate calls a “defining moment” for the images trade, “when infinite images can be easily generated and algorithms favor likes and trends over originality and craft.” The new advert marketing campaign strikes on the coronary heart of most of the fears that photographers, each novice {and professional} alike, are feeling within the AI age.

Alongside the marketing campaign, VSCO’s CEO, Eric Wittman, launched a letter to the general public.

“We’ve all heard it: ‘Photography is dying.’ Social platforms are burying your best work in an endless reel of trends. Traditional tools are telling you to skip the photoshoot. Brands are replacing real photos with generated ones. And the doubting voices in the room are telling you to quit,” Wittman writes.

“We are not one of those voices. We champion photographers. We always have and always will.

“Your eye, the way you see the world, can’t be generated. It can’t be prompted. It’s irreplaceable.

“Real work made by real people has never mattered more. People feel the difference. They’re searching for it, even when the algorithm never shows it to them.


“Photography isn’t dying. It’s never mattered more. You’re exactly what this moment needs.

“We’ve got your back,” Wittman concludes.

As a part of its marketing campaign, VSCO labored with a pair of photographers from the VSCO neighborhood, Jared Thomas Tapy and Ivana Cajina. VSCO says it chosen these two photographers for his or her distinct types, and every was tasked with documenting the opposite in their very own artistic ingredient, utilizing a mixture of digital and analog images.

“No one but you is behind the lens,” VSCO says.

PetaPixel’s Take

Damn straight. It’s refreshing to listen to an organization, even one which builds AI instruments for photographers, so adamantly state that it’s not thinking about promoting us out.

Now, in fact, VSCO is just not allergic to AI as an organization. Despite the corporate saying that what photographers do and see can’t be “prompted,” VSCO’s AI Lab, which launched final October, does actually have prompts.

While that might conceivably undercut the corporate’s message a bit, VSCO’s clear focus has lengthy been and stays discovering methods to empower photographers to do good, actual work. The firm has dedicated vital assets in latest months and years to smoothing out widespread friction factors for professionals, for instance, enabling them to focus extra on capturing and fewer on all of the tedium that comes with being a working photographer.

Aftershoot, which is explicitly an AI picture modifying firm, just lately sung the same tune, promising to by no means work towards photographers’ pursuits.

There is all the time a lingering query in circumstances like this. Are firms really critical about not solely empowering photographers but in addition actively defending the craft from encroaching AI know-how for the precise causes? Will the attitudes shift if the circulation of cash modifications down the highway?

It’s not possible to foretell the long run, however I’ve spoken candidly with VSCO’s CEO, Eric Wittman, many occasions through the years, and he has by no means wavered from VSCO’s dedication to growing instruments for actual photographers to create higher actual images.

Aside from that, it’s simply all the time good to listen to an organization inform photographers, “We see you and we believe in the value of what you do.”


Image credit: VSCO