The photography moment

The people who grieved hardest when digital photography arrived weren’t casual snappers.

They were darkroom people.

The ones who had built their whole practice around chemistry and timing and light. Who knew by feel how long to leave a print in the developer tray. Who understood the specific satisfaction of watching an image slowly appear on a blank sheet of paper in a red-lit room, like a secret the photograph was deciding whether to tell you.

Digital didn’t just change the tool. It made the room itself unnecessary.

For a while, the grief was loud. Forums full of people explaining why film captured something digital couldn’t. Why the process mattered. Why something real was being lost.

They weren’t entirely wrong. Something was being lost.

But here’s what nobody in those forums was saying: photography was about to get ten times bigger.

I think about the darkroom people every time a founder or designer tells me they’re worried about what AI is going to do to their career.

The fear is always the same underneath. Not laziness. More specific than that: the fear that the years they spent getting good at something are about to count for less.

I had that fear too. Still do sometimes.

But I think it’s pointed at the wrong thing.

This happens every time a new tool arrives.

Not just with photography. Every generation of builders gets a version of this moment. A tool shows up that does cheaply and quickly what used to require years of practice and real money. The people who built their careers on the old way feel the ground move.

What usually follows surprises everyone.

When photography went fully digital, the number of photographers didn’t shrink. It exploded. Phones made everyone a photographer. Which sounds like it should have destroyed the profession. Instead it created a much larger audience that eventually learned to tell the difference between a good photograph and a lucky one. The professionals didn’t disappear. The category grew around them.

The same thing happened when software like PageMaker and Quark arrived in the late eighties and let anyone design a flyer on a computer, which terrified professional print designers at the time. Same pattern when home recording software let musicians make albums in their bedrooms. Same pattern again when tools like Webflow started letting people build websites without writing code.

More people doing something doesn’t diminish the people who do it well. It usually creates a bigger audience that eventually learns to tell the difference.

The grief is real. The fear is misdirected.

The darkroom photographers who struggled weren’t wrong that something was lost. The ritual mattered. The slowing-down mattered. The specific knowledge of how different papers responded to different chemistry was real expertise that didn’t just transfer to editing software overnight.

But the ones who stayed stuck were the ones who kept arguing about what had been lost, rather than asking what had just become possible.

Digital photography changed what the medium could be used for. It made iteration fast enough that you could experiment in ways that would have been financially stupid on film. It opened photography to people who could never have afforded a darkroom. Whole new genres appeared. New platforms. New ways for images to move through the world.

The darkroom photographers who made it through weren’t the ones with the least attachment to the old process. Some of them loved film deeply and kept shooting it on weekends. What they had was clarity about why they picked up a camera in the first place.

They were making images that did something. The darkroom was just where those images used to come from.

The hard part isn’t learning the tools.

The founders and designers I see struggling most with AI mostly understand the tools fine. That’s not where it’s stuck.

It’s stuck because they built their sense of professional value around a specific kind of effort. The hours spent. The craft it required. The difficulty of the thing as evidence that it mattered.

AI is cheap and fast. And if your identity as a builder is tied to how hard building is, cheap and fast feels like a direct attack on whether what you make means anything.

I know that feeling from the inside.

Early in my career I was working on a consumer app, and I spent about three weeks obsessing over a single transition animation between two screens. The timing, the easing curve, how the elements moved in relation to each other. I told myself it was craft. Looking back, it was ego. The users never noticed. They were trying to complete a task. Nobody opens an app hoping to admire the transition animations.

The difficulty had become the point. Which meant I was building for myself and calling it user-centred design.

AI removes the difficulty tax on building. That’s uncomfortable if your identity is attached to paying that tax. But if what you actually care about is the thing you’re making and the people it’s for, it’s a gift.

The darkroom people who found their footing weren’t the ones who abandoned film entirely, and they weren’t the ones who refused to touch a digital camera.

They were the ones who got honest about why they started.

For most of them, the answer had nothing to do with chemistry or developer trays or the red-lit room. It was simpler than that. They wanted to make someone feel something when they looked at an image. They wanted to capture a moment before it disappeared.

The darkroom had been how. It was never the why.

If you’re a founder or a designer and AI has been keeping you up at night, that’s the question worth asking yourself.

Why did you start building?

Not “how do I stay relevant” or “which tools should I learn next.” Those are fine questions but they’re downstream of this one. Answer this one honestly and the others get easier.

The room changed. The light didn’t.