Black and white historical cityscape with buildings and streets.

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  In the spring of 1838, Louis Daguerre pointed his camera at a Paris street. He was not looking for a person. He was trying to capture a city. One of the first photograph ever taken and the first one with people in it. Look at the two figures. OneContinue Reading

Road sign pointing to Provenance in a desert setting with mountains in the background.

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At the Media Provenance Summit in Bergen on September 22, a lot was said and shown about producing transparent and indelible provenance information. Little, if anything, was said about how the general public would receive and understand that information. Neeltje Berger and Viktor Kewenig of Microsoft Research presented “Design LedContinue Reading

Media Provenance Summit 2026 presentation slide in Bergen, Norway.

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Bergen, one year later: On September 22, the Media Provenance Summit organized by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) and Media Cluster Norway returned to Bergen, almost as reliably as a season. The yearly comparison gives some valuable insight into how the space evolves. In twelve months, almost everything neededContinue Reading

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For most of photography’s history, a photograph was its own proof: if you had a picture of something, it had probably happened. AI has ended that, producing images the eye cannot tell from real photographs, which is an acute problem for anyone whose work depends on a photograph being believed.Continue Reading

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Ask anyone how they know an image was generated, and they will describe a search for flaws: a sixth finger, a window that reflects nothing, a bracelet that melts into a wrist, skin with no pores, light that seems to fall from two directions at once. The search assumes thereContinue Reading

Clear mountain stream flowing over mossy rocks in a lush forest setting.

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A paper published in Nature Communications on August 18 has been covered as a discovery that AI models forget where their material came from. The finding is more specific than that, and specific in ways that matter to anyone who licenses images for a living. Zheng Dai and David GiffordContinue Reading

Young woman shopping for snacks in a grocery store aisle.

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What happens when the decision-maker never actually sees your ad? “Looking great” is no longer a single thing. It used to be. A brand published a visual, a campaign image, a product shot, a banner ad, and the question was simple: Does this stop someone? Does it hold attention? DoesContinue Reading

Person examining photographic negatives for provenance verification.

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Images cost nothing to produce now and arrive in unlimited numbers. The usual conclusion is that they have become disposable, and that being disposable, they can no longer be trusted. The facts in that description are right. The conclusion moves too fast, because trusting a photograph has always meant twoContinue Reading

Colorful sketches of website wireframes for design exploration.

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For most of the last forty years, the answer was simple. Design resided in a department. It had a door, a head count, a queue, and a budget line. Marketing wrote a brief, the design team produced the asset, and the asset came back through a review cycle that everyone,Continue Reading

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For two hundred years, ever since Niépce left a pewter plate in a window for the better part of a day, a photograph was something you could interrogate yourself. You looked at it, and you decided. The light behaved, or it betrayed a seam. The shadows agreed with the room,Continue Reading