Notes from an Analog Practice: Relational Truth, Ethical Labor and the Documentary Image
There are days when I sit with my cameras spread across the table—bodies, lenses, light meters, stacks of film—and I try to remember what it felt like to pick them up without hesitation. Before every photograph carried a shadow question: What does this even mean anymore?
I’ve been photographing for nearly four decades. Long enough to watch the medium shift under my feet more than once. But something about this moment feels different—heavier, less stable. It isn’t nostalgia tugging at me. It’s something else, something harder to name. It’s the sense that the ground photography once shared with the public—the shared assumption that an image pointed toward something real—has thinned to the point of transparency.
People call it the post-truth era, as if truth were a passing trend, a phase the culture decided to outgrow. Donald Trump and his loyalists brandish the word Truth like a weapon while dismissing everything that challenges them as “fake.” And now we have AI tools capable of generating images that look like photographs but have no connection to lived experience. No moment of standing in the cold. No breath held. No conversation with someone whose life is on the edge of being misrepresented.
And here I am, loading a sheet of Portra into a film holder, trying to understand what it means to insist on this slow, stubborn act of looking when so much around us is built to distract, destabilize, and deceive.
Photography never promised purity. No photograph ever told the whole truth. But there used to be a shared faith that it told a truth—a piece of the world filtered through a human body standing in a particular place, making a particular decision. That faith has eroded—not from photographic error, but from the growing instability of truth itself.
The institutions that once claimed to safeguard knowledge have been exposed as partial, self-protective, selective in their commitments. The crisis did not begin with AI. It began with the slow recognition that many truths were never allowed to enter the archive in the first place.
Still, the documentary image isn’t dead. It simply functions differently now. Not as a certificate of authenticity, but as a record of engagement—a mark that someone showed up, paid attention, and took responsibility for shaping meaning of what physically stood before them.
For me analog materials—film, negatives, transparencies—offer protection against the uncertainty of our era. Holding a negative in my hands feels grounding. It’s a physical trace, a piece of the world captured by light and chemistry, not algorithms.
But a negative settles nothing. It doesn’t prove innocence or guilt. It doesn’t silence misinformation. It doesn’t neutralize propaganda.
What film does provide is presence. Time. Labor. The friction of decision-making. A transparency on a light table is not evidence of truth; it is evidence of care—of someone choosing to stay long enough in one place to be shaped by it.
AI can simulate grain, palettes, and emulsions. But it cannot simulate risk. It cannot simulate the weight of showing up.
The negative cannot anchor truth. But it can anchor attention—and that is something.
Western conversations about photography tend to orbit around verification: What is true? How do we know? How do we prove it? But there are those who approach the image differently, offering frameworks rooted in relation, responsibility, and shared meaning rather than universal claims.
Trinh T. Minh-ha warns against the arrogance of believing that the camera allows us to “give voice” or “show the truth” of others. For her, the documentary image is not a transparent window—it is a meeting point, a threshold where meaning is exchanged rather than delivered.^1
This resonates with my own experience. Documentary work has always felt less like declaring truth and more like entering a conversation, one that asks something of both sides.
Byung-Chul Han argues that the digital era produces a world of “total surface and no depth,” where images circulate endlessly but never settle into experience.^2 This feels accurate to me. Digital photographs move too quickly to be held, let alone questioned. Working with film is not a rejection of the present; it is a refusal of speed. It insists on duration, on the time it takes for meaning to form. A film image is not simply slower; it slows you.
Writing about Mongolian nomadic communities, Ariunaa Tserendavaa describes photographs not as proof but as relational memory—objects carried through generations, connecting families, landscapes, and pasts.^3 The photograph holds value because of whom it binds together, not because it captures an objective truth.
These perspectives offer a path forward. Documentary photography doesn’t need to hitch its legitimacy to Western ideals of objectivity. It can stand on other foundations: relation, accountability, presence, encounter.
Western philosophy often treats truth as a fixed, verifiable state. But many Eastern traditions emphasize relational truth—truth as process rather than object.
In Zen Buddhist aesthetics, the concept of ma (間)—the interval or space-between—describes meaning as something that emerges in the relation between things rather than within the thing itself.^4 A photograph, in this view, is not an absolute statement but a site of encounter. Its “truth” exists in the dialogue between photographer, subject, and viewer.
Similarly, in Islamic philosophy, ḥaqq (truth or rightness) is bound to justice and ethical relation, not merely factual accuracy.^5 A documentary photograph can thus be “true” in its ethical stance even if it cannot claim perfect objectivity.
These frameworks help clarify my own motivations in long-term projects—whether photographing the industrial toxicity of Newtown Creek or the layered diasporas of New York. I am not attempting to deliver unquestionable truth. I am attempting to practice responsible witnessing.
In some of my longer projects—industrial corridors, neighborhoods facing erasure, post-9/11 borderlands—I’ve also noticed a shift in how people relate to the camera. They are more aware of how images circulate. More cautious. More strategic about how they are seen.
This shift doesn’t weaken documentary work. It strengthens it by demanding more responsibility from the person behind the lens.
In Detroit, where I photographed the landscape reshaped by abandonment, residents were already skeptical of outside narratives long before “post-truth” entered the public vocabulary. They had seen their neighborhoods framed as ruins, case studies, or cautionary tales—images that circulated widely but returned nothing. That skepticism sharpened my obligations because it made clear that photography was not neutral terrain and it exposed how often photography takes without returning anything. I could not assume trust or authority; I had to earn it through time, conversation, and transparency about how the images would circulate. Collaboration meant being answerable—to the people who lived there, and to the consequences of how their environment would be represented.
In 2002, this understanding took form through a project I worked on with Kyong Park titled Words, Images and Spaces: A Language for a New City. Rather than producing images that spoke about Detroit, we worked from within the community, pairing photographs with statements from residents themselves. These were not captions explaining the images, but aspirations—people speaking about what they wanted their city to become as it changed around them.
The project treated language and space as inseparable. The city was considered not as a site of decline to be documented, but as something actively authored by those who lived there. A future city imagined from words placed alongside images, shaped by collective desire rather than external diagnosis. In that context, photography functioned less as representation and more as infrastructure—a framework for listening, for exchange, for imagining a city borne out of community engagement rather than imposed vision.
In Cairo Ring Road photographing informal settlements, government-built social housing, and the rise of gated upscale compounds on former agricultural and desert lands, the camera was a witness to emotional, political, and spatial tension. The images registered pressures. They reflected the fraught reality of being there, which no AI-generated image can approximate precisely because it was never physically there.
The rise of synthetic imagery makes these questions more urgent. AI-generated pictures can now replicate the look of documentary photography with ease, collapsing distinctions between the photographed and the fabricated.
Vilém Flusser predicted this decades ago. He argued that as “technical images” become automatic, they stop describing the world and start generating their own closed systems of meaning.^6 He feared a future where the photograph becomes a self-referential artifact detached from human intention.
Today, the deeper crisis is not that AI images deceive—it’s that all images are now suspected of deception. The photograph no longer arrives with credibility; it must earn its truth through context, transparency, and relational trust.
What unsettles me most about contemporary images is not simply that they can deceive, but that they increasingly function without anyone ever really looking at them. Trevor Paglen has pointed out that many digital photographs today are made primarily to be read by machines rather than people—to be scanned, categorized, and acted upon inside systems we rarely see or control.^7 In this sense, the image no longer circulates as a shared object of attention. It becomes a signal inside automated infrastructures of recognition and surveillance. The photograph withdraws from public encounter and reappears as data.
This shift matters because it changes the ethical ground photography stands on. A digital image can exist without conversation, without context, without consequence. It can vanish the moment a screen goes dark while continuing to operate elsewhere—training systems, triggering responses, reinforcing profiles. Film works differently. An undeveloped roll remains inaccessible to both human and machine until it passes through a physical process. A negative does not circulate on its own. It has to be handled, stored, printed, shown. These delays and frictions don’t make the photograph more truthful, but they slow its movement and return it to human scale. In a culture built on speed and extraction, slowness becomes a form of resistance.
As someone still working with analog processes, I’m often told that film photographs are “more real” because they cannot be generated by code. There is truth in that claim: film produces a physical trace—light passes through a lens and touches material, leaving an index that is not easily simulated.
This is why I resist the idea that analog practice is about preserving craft or aura. What matters to me is embodiment. A film photograph insists on a body behind the camera and a world in front of it. It resists becoming purely informational. In a moment when images float free of location, authorship, and responsibility, the negative stands as a trace of contact—evidence that someone was there, that a relationship took place, that a decision was made. Paglen warns us about the automation of vision. Working with film, for me, is one way of refusing that automation—not by retreating into the past, but by insisting that photography remain accountable to human presence.
Achille Mbembe writes that the photographic archive is always entangled with power, authorship, and exclusion.^8 A film negative cannot escape that, yet its anchoring in the physical world matters precisely now, when digital images float freely without location, source, or witness.
Slide film deepens this effect. A transparency held to light requires no translation. It is not a file; it is an object. In public presentations, I increasingly find myself showing actual slides, or printing contact sheets, or presenting negatives as part of the work. These gestures are not nostalgic—they are political.
They insist that the photograph still has a body.
Allan Sekula reminded us that every photograph is embedded in structures of labor and power. The documentary image gains its force not from its resemblance to reality, but from its relationship to reality—the social and political conditions that shaped its creation.^9
Non-Western aesthetics offer a similar reminder: representation is not a mirror but an unfolding. Truth is less a fixed anchor and more a resonance that emerges through relation.
This feels aligned with the path I want my work to take now: not speaking for the world, and not claiming to speak the whole truth of it, but participating in its truths—responsively, responsibly, and with awareness of the limits and possibilities of my own gaze.
AI can fabricate images endlessly. But it cannot replace the ethical weight of a person standing in a real place, witnessing another life, and taking responsibility for how that moment will be carried forward. If the ground beneath photography is shifting, then the task is not to reassert old certainties, but to adapt with clarity and humility—to keep making images that carry the trace of human presence, human judgment, and human risk.
- Anthony Hamboussi, 2026
Notes
Trinh T. Minh‑ha, When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1991).
Byung‑Chul Han, The Transparency Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015).
Ariunaa Tserendavaa, “Photographic Memory and Nomadic Temporality,” Inner Asia 15, no. 2 (2013): 233–247.
Daisetz T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959), 16–18.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Islamic Art and Spirituality (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 25–30.
Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, trans. Anthony Mathews (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 10–14.
Trevor Paglen, “Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You),” The New Inquiry, December 8, 2016.
Achille Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” in Refiguring the Archive, ed. Carolyn Hamilton et al. (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002), 19–27.
Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 3–64.