Kunulo writes thoughtful and thought-provoking articles, like this one about parents using AI to remove watermarks and upscale low resolution photos of their children, sent to them by school photographers as a way of marketing high resolution prints:
What happens, he asks, when technology makes something that once required considerable skill and effort seem almost worthless? This kind of thing has happened repeatedly, even before the industrial revolution. The skilled artisan loses, the owners of industry win. Once, 200 years ago, textile workers protesting about automation, working hours and child labour raided factories and destroyed machines; they weren't the first - industrial protests happened in the 17th and 18th centuries too. Of course the factory owners responded with violence and called out the militia; people were shot. In 2026 it's unthinkable that skilled workers adversely affected by AI will do anything more than shrug their shoulders and go to work in a call centre or to deliver parcels for Amazon. We are unlikely to see data centres set alight.
Not all skilled trades run the same risks and professional photographers will still be required to record weddings and christenings and all manner of other events, even if some people try to steal their work, because what is really important is their people skills. They will charge an attendance fee and won't just rely on selling prints or high res digital files to make a living, and judging by how much I paid the photographer for my daughter's wedding, they are already doing that.
About 15 years ago I used to collect 1960s Kodachrome slides. Browsing on eBay I came across something I wouldn't normally buy, which was boxes of medium format negatives owned by a photographic studio in the London borough of Hackney, R.A. Gibson Photograpers. Ron Gibson had died and they were closing down, so needed to clear their storeroom.
I bought one box of around 100 different sets of negatives from the 1950s and as soon as I saw the images I knew this was important and that it was vital to keep the whole collection together. I called the seller and asked how many more he had like this. A couple of boxes had already been sold, but he still had all of the remaining negatives from the day the studio opened for business in 1952, through to about 1978. To keep a long story short, I offered to buy all of them, which ended up being what I estimated at 50,000 images, but in fact there are many more than that. The seller had a log book which matched each set or assignment to a customer name, but that was the only identifying information he had.
The reason the collection is important is because it is a record of the demographic changes in Hackney in a key period of history. In the 1950s the population of the borough was white and working class, with a sizeable Jewish community. People went to Ron Gibson to get their weddings and Bar Mitzvahs photographed. By the 1970s the white working class and the Jewish community were largely gone, and Gibson's customers were mostly people from the Caribbean, Africa and the Indian sub-continent. They came to him for studio portraits of themselves in their nurses uniforms or their best Sunday clothes, to send back to their families abroad.
I intended to digitise the collection and maybe to publish a book of photos. However, after plugging away at that for months I realised that it would take me many years to complete, so I donated the whole collection to Hackney Museum & Archives. They got a grant to digitise and preserve it, and they made a film about it, including interviews with some of the people in the photos who they managed to track down. I was interviewed for the film too, and you can see and hear me at various points throughout:
Strike a Pose: Portraits from a Hackney Photo Studio (YouTube)
The BBC also have an article about the collection here with plenty of photos:
A thousand unknown faces in a trove of Hackney pictures
If you watch the film you'll hear that Ron Gibson was good with people. He could build rapport with anyone who came through the studio door, put them at ease, explain how to pose, and former customers and staff talk about that. He was a self-taught photographer but you might say he was born to it. Today he'd have digital equipment and Adobe Lightroom rather than a wet darkroom, but his people skills would still be what got him the glowing reviews, even if the images looked different now.
Email: kdan01 [at] posteo [dot] net