Soo Burnell

I’ve been looking at a lot of street photography recently, full of all the glorious noise and chaos of human life; barely constrained visual hubbub. So it was a nice change of pace when I fell into Scottish photographer Soo Burnell’s ongoing Poolside series (via Blind Magazine), collected in her book To the Water. All that light and geometry an eery sterility. Love it.

Stepping away from the water, Soo recently started a new series looking at cinemas, starting with The Scotsman Picture House in Edinburgh and the Regent Street Cinema in London. It’s fascinating to see how her poolside aesthetic translated to this new environment – expanses of water and tiling replaced with seats and curtains; sunlit blues and whites replaced with musty reds and greens.

I hate that my first response when seeing immaculately composed photography like this is now ugh Ai. Along with everything else wrong with AI-generated images, it’s undermining the immediacy of photography – I don’t want to have to study an image for increasingly abstruse clues as to whether or not it’s real! With art it’s bad enough, but now it’s seeping into news media. Fake photojournalism isn’t just directly insidious, it’s programming us to doubt the authentic.