A conversation with Albert Watson on discipline, and the dynamics between photographer and subject.

Transmission 354: Interview with Albert Watson

Few artists have shaped the visual vocabulary of the last half-century as profoundly as Albert Watson. He possesses a singular relationship with depth and dimension that has redefined the photographic medium. The raw intensity of a portrait and the sculptural elegance of a landscape submit equally to the same graphic precision. With a legacy rooted in the chemistry of the darkroom, he is a bridge between the golden age of film and the digital frontier, a master of light who approaches every subject, from a world leader to a simple object, with the same exacting attention. His perception of space is unusually acute, and his relationship with it shapes every compositional decision. He has been blind in one eye since birth, but this has never interfered in any way with his work. He simply explains that while people usually think of the average person as having sight in both eyes, when someone picks up a camera, they only use one eye to look through the viewfinder, exactly as he does. His work is a masterclass in lighting, composition, graphic precision, rhythm, and psychological intensity, with a precise angle and style that highlights identity and subtle power. Named one of the twenty most influential photographers of all time by Photo District News, his archive includes the most well-known personalities of cultural history: rock stars, rappers, actors and other celebrities, among them memorable portraits of Alfred Hitchcock, Andy Warhol, Steve Jobs and Sinead O’Connor. Over the years, his images have appeared on more than a hundred covers of Vogue around the world and been featured in countless other publications, from Rolling Stone to Time to Vibe. But to call him a “celebrity photographer” is to miss the point. Albert Watson operates across registers that few photographers have mastered simultaneously: the psychological, the architectural, the commercial, the iconic.

The breadth of his archive is not a sign of versatility for its own sake; it reflects a clear and consistent intelligence behind the lens. He has said that one of the best compliments he has ever received came from a very good creative director who told him: “Even the very last shot at the end of a hard day, for you it almost seemed more important than the first shot of the day.” He has also directed over 100 TV commercials, photographed dozens of posters for major Hollywood films such as Kill Bill, Memoirs of a Geisha, and The Da Vinci Code, and produced images for hundreds of successful advertising campaigns for major corporations such as GAP, Levi’s, Revlon, and Chanel. In addition to solo and group exhibitions, his prints are exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide. He has won numerous honors, including a Lucie Award, a Grammy Award, the Hasselblad Masters Award and three ANDY Awards. He was awarded the Royal Photographic Society’s Centenary Medal and Honorary Fellowship (HonFRPS) in recognition of a sustained, significant contribution to the art of photography in 2010. Queen Elizabeth II awarded Watson an Order of the British Empire (OBE) in June 2015 for services to photography. Cyclops (1994, Little, Brown), Maroc (1998, Rizzoli), and Albert Watson (2007, Phaidon) are only a few of the books Watson has authored. In the fall of 2010, two volumes were published: Strip Search, a two-volume collection of hundreds of photos Watson shot in Las Vegas, and UFO: Unified Fashion Objectives, a look at 40 years of selected Watson fashion photos. Kaos (2017, Taschen) is another example. Furthermore, other catalogs of Watson’s images have been released for exhibitions, such as The Vienna Album (2005).

Official site

What are your best memories of your early days in the fields of photography? Have you always dreamed of being a photographer, even when you were a child?

It’s a simple story. When I was 15, I borrowed my father’s box camera, a 1932 camera, and he gave me two rolls of film. I took some pictures, and I loved doing the pictures. But I had no more contact with it again.

I always remember it, and I enjoyed that. Then, when I was 22 and studying graphic design at art college, they started a course in photography as part of the graphic design. So, graphic design was the main subject, and then, as a craft subject, they had photography. The minute I got in touch with it, I knew that it was something that felt natural to me right away. So, I’m going to use the wrong word here for that point in time: it felt easy for me, comfortable. It was like putting on an old sweater; you just feel comfortable.

Of course, at that point, it was a long road because photography has two aspects, like a lot of art. It has technical aspects and creative aspects. So, if you are a painter, you need technical ability to do a painting, and you need creative ability to do it. For a photographer, it’s a little bit the same. You need to master technical things, which for me was very difficult, but I realized that by mastering technical things, it opened up creative doors. So, it made me more creative, the more technical I got. And with a combination of technical and creative, and a passion for photography, then for me it was a perfect match.

Your work often balances simplicity and intensity. Your portraits often feel very controlled, yet intimate. How did you build trust quickly in high-pressure environments?

Preparation. I was always preparing; I never just turned up and said nothing. The minute I got near to a shooting, and by ‘near’ I mean one week away, not 10 minutes before, I was already deep into it. Research and preparation. Equipment preparation is obvious, of course; everything must be perfect, tested, ready. But that’s not what I mean by preparation. That part, yes, it’s important, everything has to work. 

But creative preparation is really important, because that’s how you are going to handle this. And sometimes, when I speak to young photographers, they always have this thing: they say they like to be spontaneous. They always say that they like to make it up as they go along.

But sometimes, to be successful at that, you either have to be the Mozart of photography, just creating beautiful images from nothing all the time, every time you point the camera. I think that sometimes younger photographers are a bit lazy about this idea of spontaneity. Just because you’re prepared, because you do homework, because you do research, hours of homework, hours of research, hours of creative preparation, that doesn’t mean to say that you can’t be spontaneous. Of course, you’re always looking for things to photograph on certain types of projects.

So, for certain types of projects, you have an appointment to photograph somebody like Steve Jobs. So what’s your philosophy when you go in to meet somebody like Steve Jobs? That’s preparation, because there is, you might say, the light at the end of the tunnel, which is meeting him, and that’s always going to be there. You don’t suddenly say you’ll photograph him at the coffee shop on the corner. That’s spontaneous, but you can’t; Steve Jobs is Steve Jobs. You make an appointment and he is there. You can’t say, ‘Oh, can I take you to your kitchen at home?’ No, it’s not going to happen. So you have to have that sense, yes, of spontaneity, but be prepared. That’s what is important.

When you photographed well-known people, how did you move beyond the public image the audience already has of them? Was it harder to make a portrait of someone everyone knew, or someone not popular?

This is part of research. If you photograph David Bowie, you look at all the pictures of David Bowie. We know that David Bowie liked creativity; that he was a creative person, a musician, but he was also a creative person in a broader sense.

So, the time that I photographed him, I had him for a whole day. He was going to come at 10 o’clock, and he said he was available from 10 o’clock in the morning till seven in the evening. That’s a long time. And I did research on it, and I proposed a series of some spontaneous shots, but some that I had things prepared for him that I wanted to do, like his head in a box, for example. So, the pictures were a little bit surreal and strange. And he loved everything when I presented it, and he said he would bring some things as well. He brought, at that time, a wonderful black mask with the crucifixion on the mask. So, when someone’s like that, they’re helping you.

One of the first pictures I did, the celebrities I photographed, was Alfred Hitchcock, and he was helping me. So, I was very lucky to get somebody; I was prepared and he was prepared, but he was also helping me to do the photo, to make the picture better. So, sometimes you’re lucky that people help you.

But, of course, by doing research on the situation and personality, you’re trying to do something that you, as the photographer, like, that fits your style, if there is a style there, but you want something a little bit original. And in the beginning, I worked very hard on lighting, especially in studio situations, when you’re in the studio. I worked very hard on that for years, and it was painful to do. But, as I said earlier in this conversation, because of the hard work, it enabled me to do interesting and different things, because I had a lot of ideas about how to construct lighting. So, that was just one aspect.

What’s the biggest risk you’ve taken in a portrait that actually paid off?

I think it may have been in the very beginning, with Alfred Hitchcock, because I was a photographer in Los Angeles at the time. I had only been a working photographer for a couple of years. And, of course, I had a lot of education. I had four years of art training, graphic design training, and some photography. And then I had three years at the Royal College of Art in London, film school. So, I had a combination of graphic design, photography, and film. All of these things helped me.

But when I got the call from New York while I was in Los Angeles, for me, it was a big thing. And they said, ‘Could you photograph somebody famous for us?’ Then they said it was Alfred Hitchcock. And, of course, I had just come out of film school, so it was amazing to get a chance to photograph him.

And they said they wanted to do Alfred Hitchcock for the Christmas issue of Harper’s Bazaar. He was giving the magazine a recipe on how to cook a goose for Christmas, because Alfred Hitchcock was very interested in cooking. He loved cooking, and it was his main relaxation after work. They said they would like to do Alfred Hitchcock holding a plate with a goose on the plate.

I thought about it and said it sounded great. I had no problem doing Alfred Hitchcock with a plate, but I thought it was maybe funnier to photograph him before he cooked the goose; in other words, with it in his hand. And I said it might be funny if he’s got the goose by the neck, because he’s Alfred Hitchcock. We know he’s going to finish the goose off. And I said I could get some Christmas decorations to put around the goose’s neck, so the image says ‘Christmas.’ They said, ‘Let’s wait and find out.’ They asked the editor-in-chief, and the editor-in-chief, thank God, loved the idea. He said you don’t need to put the goose on the plate.

So that’s a very small example of thinking about a shooting and constructing it in your mind. You hope it works; it’s a risk. And you hope that people respond well. But I was clever, because I didn’t say to them, ‘I’m not doing it with a plate.’ I was happy to get the magazine shot, so I said, ‘I’ll do the plate, but I think this could be maybe better.’ And then they called back and said yes, they thought that was a better idea, and I didn’t need to do the plate.

So that’s an example of my training as a graphic designer, in concept training, to conceptualize a shooting: the Christmas decorations on the neck, the goose not yet cooked. There’s also an expression you might not know. The headline was ‘Alfred Hitchcock Cooks His Own Goose,’ which is an English expression. When you say to somebody, ‘You cooked your own goose,’ it means you got yourself in trouble; you can’t blame anybody else. You did it yourself.

So when they said, ‘Alfred Hitchcock Cooks His Own Goose,’ there was a play on the expression: did Alfred Hitchcock get himself in trouble by cooking the goose, or not? It was a very nice headline with the photo. They presented it perfectly on the page, and it changed my whole career. After that, I was working all the time.

You’ve worked through massive technological shifts, from analog to digital, from your point of view, your career, your experience, what has been gained and what has been lost?

Nothing! Nothing’s been lost. And I’ll tell you why nothing’s been lost, it’s a question that I get asked a lot, but nothing’s been lost. If you’re a young photographer and you say you hate digital and everything digital, you can go out and buy an old-fashioned camera from 1980. You can buy the film that they make today. You can take negatives or positive film, transparency, color, black and white. You can go into a darkroom with black and white paper and you can make a print the old-fashioned way. So in some ways, nothing’s been lost because it’s still there. It’s not that digital cameras came and then they burned all of the old cameras; the old cameras are still available, so you can still use analog.

To me, the camera, what it is now, twenty-five years ago, you picked up an analog camera, you looked into it, and what you saw was a rectangle: sometimes horizontal, sometimes vertical or square. You pick up a digital camera, you look into the viewfinder and you have a rectangle. So old cameras had a rectangle, new cameras have a rectangle. There’s a lot more information available to you on a digital camera, the majority of which I don’t need. This information comes on the screen and I don’t need it. You do a landscape picture and it tells you that the clouds are overexposed. And of course, I know the clouds are overexposed. So I’m surprised that people spend $8,000 and buy information telling them that the clouds are overexposed. I would think if you’re going to spend $8,000, $10,000, or more on a camera, you would assume the photographer is serious enough to know that the clouds are overexposed.

So what I’m saying is nothing was lost. The main difference is not analog cameras versus digital cameras. The big thing for me was the computer; the computer made me more creative. That is the main thing. The computer added so many layers of creativity to work with, that’s what I like about the digital age. I like computers. The camera, for me… you pick up the camera, rectangle, same as it was. But the technical aspect of what you can do with the computer is what’s important.

And for years, if you imagine you could have a time machine and you go back, and this is one thing that always fascinated me, you could go back in time and go back to, say for example, Degas. I have a wonderful book called Degas Landscapes. He did a lot of landscapes, not just ballet dancers, but landscapes. And if you were behind Degas when he was doing a painting of a simple hill, and the hill had red poppy flowers in there, and if you were behind him as he finished the painting, and you said to Degas, ‘I just counted the poppies on the hill, and I count 20 poppies on the hill. But in your painting, you have 36 poppies,’ of course, it would be absurd to mention this to Degas because he’s doing a painting.

However, if you then take a photographer who does a picture of the same hill, and there are 20 poppies there, and you, with the computer, make it 36 poppies, people have an issue with that because you’re altering reality. And a painter already works in the abstract. So, my feeling now is I can take a picture of the hill, and I can put 100 poppies into that photo. And if it makes the image more powerful, more electric, more special, more beautiful, whatever, then I think it’s absolutely valid.

So what you see on the wall, on a piece of paper, or a piece of linen or canvas or whatever, from a photographer: the photographer now has the freedom to do that. Painters, if you think of Gauguin painting pictures in Tahiti, he alters the colour of the foliage. So sometimes a palm leaf is not green, but it’s red. A photographer now can do that. So the computer gives you much more. And if you want to be classical, there are still young photographers even now, and older photographers, who prefer just the classic approach. Whatever it is, they take the picture, and whatever it is, that’s what it is. So you can do that if you want; you don’t have to stop doing that. You can still be classic, or what you call in English a ‘purist.’ Whatever was in front of you is what you see and what you put down, and that’s the way it was. That was the reality. Now photographers have the ability to move away from reality into the surreal, and they can do different things because of the computer. If you want to go back in time, you can just go back and do whatever you want. You could go back to being an analog photographer if you want.

If you were to randomly pick a photo from the 90s could  you recognize your own emotional state in the portrait you’ve taken? How much of a portrait is actually a self-portrait of the photographer?

In a perfect world, the percentages, to say something silly, can be 50% the person, 50% the photographer. Very often, I’m working with somebody and I let the person be who they are. Sometimes I’m not saying anything; just shooting, not speaking to them.

The ones I always worked hard on were fashion models, because a lot of the time they would arrive, and you still see it today, all the time. The model arrives, she’s a very beautiful young woman, and you take the first picture. Sometimes a model does eight pages, and if you take a piece of black paper, cut a circle in it, and put it over her face, her face is identical across all eight. She never changes; she’s just looking here, looking there. There’s no portraiture. It’s what you would call a ‘beauty shot.’ And there’s a difference between a beauty shot and a portrait of a woman or a man. 

So I worked very heavily on that to try and see if there was a way that I could push these models into a different attitude: sometimes to frown, sometimes a little bit angry, sometimes looking for a certain type of smile. Don’t just smile. Is it smiling? Not just a smile. The smile, for example: you have an appointment for dinner with your boyfriend at 8:00 p.m. It’s 8:00. You’re sitting at the table in the restaurant. He’s not there. It’s ten past eight. It’s 8:15. So, emotionally, you have two things in your head. You’re angry that he’s not there, but you’re also worried. Has something happened to him? Two things. So, when you see him 20 minutes late coming through the door, you can smile because he’s okay. He walks through and he’s okay. But at the same time, he’s 20 minutes late. So, the expression of the smile is curious.

Sometimes, the trouble is that a lot of these pretty girls don’t have a lot of emotional depth. You can sometimes work better with actresses who can do it. I remember working with Scarlett Johansson, and I was very impressed by her. She’d been in front of cameras since she was a child, as a child star, and she could give you things. I remember once copying a picture with her, and we decided to copy a picture of Marilyn Monroe. I set up the shot and she said, ‘Can you let me see the picture of Marilyn?’ And in two seconds, she slipped into the attitude. So, of course, that’s a pleasure.

But to go back to your question: the perfect, of course, is a combination.

What’s one technical aspect of creating and capturing an iconic portrait that is underrated but essential?

The word ‘iconic’, there are certain classic interpretations of iconic photography. You have to be careful with ‘iconic,’ because iconic can be distant; the person can become distant from you. So, the picture is powerful, amazingly strong, and memorable. That’s one of the most important ingredients in a picture: that the picture is memorable, that you remember the picture. So, you have to be careful with ‘iconic,’ because sometimes, yes, iconic can make the picture powerful and memorable. But sometimes, if you do too many iconic pictures, you lose the human touch.

So, very often, I decide: ‘Okay, we can do a picture where this person is iconic and powerful, and the picture is memorable.’ I’ve done a lot of pictures like that. But other times, you want the picture to have a connection with the person, that you feel the person is looking into the lens and looking through the lens at the photographer. So, the person has a connection with the photographer, and you feel that in the picture. You feel that the person is happy to be photographed and is comfortable to be photographed. Maybe happy, maybe comfortable, and feels that the moment is important.

So, pictures can be iconic, memorable, powerful, heavy. And sometimes people said my photography was sometimes too strong, too heavy, and that could be because of the graphic design aspect; the graphics are so powerful in the construction.

Over your extraordinary career, you’ve immortalized thousands of memorable images. Is there a photo that carries a particularly meaningful weight, one you feel a deep personal connection to?

For me, one of the most important pictures I did was the one of  Alfred Hitchcock, because I was young and I didn’t know what I was doing yet. So, I have a good connection with that. It’s not the best picture. There are stronger, more powerful pictures than that that are better. But that was an important one because it gave me confidence to go to another level. So, that picture was important to me.

Can you see me on your screen?

Yeah, I can see you. You have a portrait behind you of a female figure with long hair.

You can see the quality of it there. All right. So, just to tell you something about that. This is a picture I did last year in Rome when I did the Rome Codex. I wanted to do a portrait that was intimate and highly technical at the same time, but it doesn’t look highly technical. So, in other words, it looks like you just took a picture. I was interested in something that was highly complex, but at the same time, when you look at the final picture, it looks like a normal picture.

And the way that was done: I took a picture of the woman with just a normal lens, so I had the reference, and I was working with two TV screens, video screens, with the picture. But what I wanted to do, I wanted to create in the picture a very strong sense of closeness to her, so you felt you were with her, not just across the room. I worked with a longer lens, a telephoto lens, and I shot the picture in pieces, in three pieces. And with the telephoto lens, you get something called compression. When you have a telephoto, your image is compressed, so the person comes closer. You can do a portrait of the person, but you don’t have the body.

So nowadays, if you shoot in pieces, three pieces, you can then afterwards reassemble the three pieces based on the original simple picture that you took at the beginning. So you have two things: you work with the snapshot of the original, but you can work with the compression to make her feel much closer to you, so that you really feel you can touch the woman.

So the idea was to present something that’s very simple, a simple and beautiful composition, but with that sense that she’s very close to you. When this was put on sale at Paris Photo, in an edition of five, in three days we sold all five of that picture. So it was successful because people didn’t know how I did it, but they felt something from the picture. And I knew when I did it that it was good. That was a nice thing. When I was working on it, I thought, ‘I bet this is good.’ I’m not always right, but I thought, ‘I bet this is good.

Talking about his job said that a lot of people in life look forward to retirement. The interesting thing about photographers is in general they don’t think about it, and wish to retire, because they love what they’re doing. They enjoy what they are doing. Even painters keep on going, since it’s not a job, it’s life.

Is there a vivid, precious photo that exists only in your mind,  an image you’ve carried with you for years but never taken, because of technical problems, or lost the critical moment?

There was a fabulous picture I missed once; I made a mistake. It was a really fabulous, amazing, incredible picture, and I missed it. I was photographing at Woodstock. I photographed a lot of people in 1994, at the 25th anniversary of Woodstock. It was very big, there were half a million people.

I was behind the stage. I had a small studio behind the stage in a tent, and I had spoken to Bob Dylan’s manager about him coming to be photographed, so that I could photograph him. Bob Dylan, at that time, hadn’t been particularly well; he wanted to just come in, perform, and then leave. His manager said, ‘But if you want, you could maybe come down and meet him.’ My studio was 100 yards from the stage, and I came down without a camera, which was a big mistake. I usually don’t make that mistake, but I did.

Just as I arrived there, a large truck pulled up to the back of the stage, and the back of the truck folded down. Out of the back of the truck came six Hells Angels, covered in tattoos and leather jackets, very big. They were all huge guys. In the middle was Bob Dylan, who’s quite small. He had glasses on and he had a guitar in his hand. He was in the middle of all the Hells Angels, right in front of me, and they walked past me.

That was a photo I should have had. There was something about it: he was so fragile, but the men were very big. So, I’m sad about that, that’s a photo I missed.

But as far as images, I’m always working on images. I’m working on different projects. Right now, I’m working with 17th-century Japanese paper with images, and I think, for me, it’s the best thing I’ve done, because the printing is really beautiful. My son said, ‘Yeah, yes, of course you like it because you did it.’

Albert once said that his wife never liked it when he did commercials. She felt that he was born to be a photographer because taking pictures came so easily to him. The couple met at age six in their native Edinburgh, Scotland, and have been together for over 70 years. 

There’s a photo on which you placed expectations, perhaps your most concentrated effort, and the world has given it less attention than other images? 

I can tell you: sometimes you make a mistake, like everybody. I’ve made thousands of mistakes. This doesn’t exactly answer your question, but I was photographing Nicole Kidman at the beginning of her career. She arrived in the studio and we had to do hair and makeup; it was a portrait for an interview in a magazine. I had said to the art director, who was a very famous art director, that she had done a movie that was about water. I said, ‘Let’s do her with makeup, and we can make the makeup wet, like it was raining,’ and that’s a portrait. So, he loved the idea; he said it was fine.

So, she arrived. I said hello to her and I went downstairs; I was printing in the darkroom, and I made a mistake. I had a makeup artist I knew very well, but I went into the darkroom and I was working on printing, and I didn’t realize time was going by. I looked at my watch and she had been in makeup for an hour and a half, and I suddenly realized that something was wrong. It was a mistake. It was my fault.

I went upstairs, and the PR person for Nicole Kidman said she had to leave in 30 minutes. So, a combination of two things here: the makeup art, to the extent that it no longer looked like Nicole Kidman. So, the makeup artist made a mistake, but ultimately, it was my fault. Because, to be quite honest, when she arrived, she had no makeup. All they needed was a little bit of black on the eyes with some mascara, and with the water, the mascara runs. That was enough.

So, at this point, I thought, ‘Well, maybe the combination of good lighting and the water…’ When we put the water on her face, she looked terrible. Like nine out of ten, terrible, not like six out of ten or five, but nine, ten. The PR person said we had to leave in five minutes. So, I got caught. And it was one of the very few times, because, as I said to you earlier about preparation, this was a mistake. That’s what happens when you don’t stay present. I never let that happen again, ever. It didn’t happen before, but it happened that night; it was a night shooting.

Sometimes there’s a very good expression in English called ‘the best-laid plans of mice and men.’ So, in other words, of course, a mouse doesn’t plan things and men do, but sometimes you make mistakes. It’s a very good expression. ‘The best-laid plans’ meaning you think of everything, but sometimes something goes wrong, or you should be thinking of more.

What Do Artists Do All Day? is a BBC Four documentary series that offers an intimate look into the daily routines and creative processes of prominent artists. Albert Watson was featured in the March 11, 2014, episode (Series 1, Episode 11), which followed him as he photographed the landscapes of the Isle of Skye.

Since photography is a profound artistic pursuit. In an age where Artificial Intelligence can generate images in seconds, how do you see the boundary between photography and art evolving? 

I quite like that AI is available. I find it quite interesting. The funny thing with AI, when I have used it, is you can feed a picture, one of my pictures, into AI, and sometimes when the work comes back, it’s simply terrible. It’s just rubbish. It’s absolute rubbish. Just junk. It doesn’t have quality. That’s one thing that people don’t realize: AI sometimes looks very good when you’re looking at it on your phone, but the picture on your phone is just this big. When you start doing something larger, it’s just junk. And you can tell it’s AI. It feels, and it reminds me in a way of a sophisticated child, what it gives you back.

But sometimes you feed pictures in and 50 things come back. But once in a while, sometimes in the badness of what AI gives you, what it thinks you want, but isn’t, there is an unusual, perhaps bad, color combination in the photo. If you’re careful, you can look at the color combination and it might be a little bit surprising, because AI, in some ways, is only as good as what you feed into it; in some ways, it doesn’t edit itself.

From his high-fashion editorials to his gritty, soul-stirring landscapes, his work is defined by detailed craft and a relentless pursuit of high-quality print.

AI is only as good as what is fed into it. Everything in AI, human beings have put in there. And then AI uses combinations. With AI, you can give it a telephone number of, say, seven digits, and AI can give you back endless combinations of those numbers. But if AI only knows that telephone number, if the seven numbers are one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and that’s all it has, AI can give you combinations of all those numbers, but AI cannot give you the number nine, because it has no knowledge of the number nine. And of course, what happens now is AI has billions, trillions of pieces of information. So, therefore, now it can give you trillions of combinations of numbers, or trillions of combinations of color.

But it’s only random, in a way. And I’m just saying, sometimes you can look at it, but it takes a creative mind to find that one good thing in AI. Sometimes one thing, maybe two things, that you say, ‘That’s interesting.’ And for me, the quality of AI doesn’t have quality yet, because it’s low quality. And also, AI demands that if it’s too much AI, if it’s 50, 60, 70, 80% AI, you have to credit AI, which is absurd, but you have to credit AI; they demand the credit, as it were. And you think, ‘Well, that’s fine.’ But AI can be interesting, because sometimes it can give you something strange, a small piece of color, that might even be, with AI, a mistake. But sometimes, if you find that little small thing, maybe it makes you better. Or you don’t use it at all; you say, ‘Okay, I don’t like it.’ But AI is not close yet to the human mind. It’s not close. Maybe it will; maybe someday it will become closer.

Photos courtesy of © Albert Watson
Thanks to Aaron Watson for the help

Dominique Musorrafiti

Ciao! My name is Dominique. I’m Italian and I’m proud to be a mix. My father was an Italian chemical engineer and high school teacher, with Greek and Polish heritage. My mother is Haitian, she was high school language teacher, with Dominican, Spanish, French, Portuguese, African and Native American heritage. Being a mix makes me appreciate to want to understand different cultures and lifestyles. I grew up in Italy, lived few years in Haiti, travel around main European capitals, lived many years in China, in Spain and UK. Traveling makes me feel that we can learn something from every situation in every part of the world.