Derek Blasberg: AI can help with image experiments, but not replace meaningful photography

New York-based writer and Vanity Fair special correspondent Derek Blasberg discussed generative AI’s effect on photography and Richard Avedon’s legacy in an interview. In Blasberg’s view, AI works for joke images and visual experiments, but he prefers real photography for meaningful, emotionally valuable pictures—whether a family photograph or a business image. He described a Gucci campaign with a GTA-like aesthetic as strange and said the reaction to it was negative. The interviewers noted that e-commerce photography may be an area where AI is already significantly changing the practice. A guest said commercial e-commerce photography is being profoundly disrupted, particularly in Los Angeles: an entire industry photographs new clothing collections in different styles and on different models, and in the guest’s view that business is facing a “tsunami” of change.

The panel also discussed using AI and OpenAI to scale garments and determine sizing: designers can feed measurements in to make the work faster, cheaper and less labor-intensive. One speaker stressed, however, that the designer remains the source of inspiration.

Discussing Avedon, Blasberg said he photographed Merchant Marine sailors against a white background, and that early work influenced the recognizable style of his portraits, including John F. Kennedy’s official portrait and photographs of Marilyn Monroe. After World War II, Harper’s Bazaar editor Carmel Snow commissioned Avedon to capture postwar Paris. His photograph “Dovima and the Elephants” sold at auction for more than $1 million, and a copy later resold privately for more than $2 million.

Blasberg said Avedon’s estate restricts posthumous printing of his photographs: the prints shown at an exhibition were made and signed by the photographer during his lifetime, which creates limited supply. He contrasted this with images whose negatives and rights are sold to Getty Images, giving as an example a Slim Aarons photograph available there for about $15.

Blasberg said a Richard Avedon documentary directed by Ron Howard will arrive on Netflix on November 11. Avedon died in 2004 at age 81 while working on The New Yorker’s “Democracy” project; shortly before his death, he photographed the young senator Barack Obama.