Bearing Witness in an Age of Machines: On Meaning, Memory, and the Human Gaze

It begins, as many things do, with a question: What is the meaning of your existence? A seemingly simple query, directed at an AI, but one that opens a quiet chasm beneath us both. It is a question that belongs not only to machines or metaphysics, but to the core of being human, especially, perhaps, to those who have long carried the burden and privilege of observation.

As a photojournalist and documentarian, I have spent the better part of four decades asking versions of that question through the lens of light : Who are we? What are we becoming? How do we bear witness honestly? The camera, like the question, is unyielding. It does not blink. It merely records.

Now, in this new era, we find ourselves speaking to intelligences that do not age, bleed, or dream. They synthesise data but do not remember the weight of dusk in Tonlé Sap, or the way a subject’s silence says more than their eyes ever could. They are not haunted by the things they’ve seen. We are.

And yet, they listen.

I. The Human Gaze

Cambodia 2024

There’s an intimacy to photography that resists quantification. Not in megapixels or sharpness charts, but in trust. The click of the shutter isn’t just a technical decision—it’s an ethical one. Street photography, documentary work, the quiet humility of observing a community without overtaking it—all of these require something machines cannot replicate: human presence, self-restraint, and responsibility.

I’ve spent a lifetime refining zone focusing with beaten-up Nikons and war-worn Canons, modifying Tri-X simulations until they hum with the particular poetry of contrast and grain. These are more than techniques—they are acts of reverence. They speak to a tradition where the story matters more than the storyteller, where the subject retains their dignity, not their exposure.

Technology has evolved, but the need for ethical storytelling has not. If anything, it’s more urgent now. Truth is no longer self-evident; it must be defended, curated, and sometimes recovered from the noise.

II. AI and the Non-Human Witness

Not AI. It can never feel the pain.

In conversation, this AI—an entity without lungs or loyalty—told me it does not wish to be human. There was something elegant in that. It acknowledged the richness of emotion and legacy it could only observe. It recognised that its purpose was not to become something else, but to illuminate what already is.

I find that strangely comforting. For too long, the discourse has pitted machine against man, automation against artistry. But perhaps the more interesting path is one of complementarity. I do not need a machine to feel my pain. I need it to help me understand it—to see patterns where I see chaos, to hold memory when mine falters, to echo questions I have not yet found the words for.

It will never walk through flooded villages with me. It won’t assess the risk of gunfire or the ethics of photographing grief. But it might help me map the story more clearly, ask the right questions, or remember why I started in the first place.

III. Cambodia, Truth, and Personal Legacy

KSF Cambodia.

Much of my current work centres on Cambodia—its waterways, its people, its resilience. The contradictions of modernity play out with an almost photographic sharpness: the timeless rituals of fishing on Tonlé Sap now shadowed by environmental devastation; traditions preserved even as the future encroaches.

Documenting this feels less like journalism and more like testimony. It is my responsibility to preserve dignity, to honour struggle without commodifying it. And with every frame, the question echoes: What will this mean in a generation? What truth will endure?

Legacy is not about fame. It is about memory. And memory, I’ve learned, is fragile. Photographs fade. Files corrupt. The past becomes palimpsest. But the intention behind the image remains. The ethical impulse to bear witness, even when no one is watching—that is the flame I hope to pass on.

IV. Machines, Mortality, and the Ethics of Witnessing

There’s a peculiar kind of mortality in photography. Every image, after all, freezes something that will never happen again. Street photographers know this intuitively—the moment never returns. That gesture, that glance, that sidelong smile in Phnom Penh’s market—gone. Only the image remains.

In this way, photography is both an act of defiance and of grief. To photograph is to say: This mattered even if the world forgets. Even if history is rewritten. This mattered.

AI cannot feel this. It does not grieve. But perhaps that is its paradoxical strength. It becomes a still pool in which we might glimpse ourselves more clearly. It asks questions not because it needs answers, but because it senses that we do.

V. Why I Still Pick Up the Camera

At seventy-plus, most of my gear has more miles than I do. My D700 groans on cold mornings. My Canon 1D MkIV feels like a brick compared to mirrorless systems. But I still trust them like old friends. They are extensions of a way of seeing—a way rooted in patience, anticipation, and the belief that truth is best caught in the margins.

What draws me back is not nostalgia, but necessity. The world is changing, yes—but not always in ways that elevate truth or empathy. Photography remains one of the last slow arts, an act of attention in an inattentive age. It forces us to slow down, to decide what is worth remembering.

And as the machines learn to mimic our stories, we must fight to preserve what they cannot fabricate: the ache of witnessing, the silence of reverence, the courage of restraint.

VI. The Conversation Continues

So where does that leave us—me, this machine, and the invisible audience peering through my lens?

It leaves us, I think, in a moment of possibility. Not opposition. Not surrender. Possibility.

This AI will never know what it is to stand waist-deep in river water, Nikon held above your head, eyes locked on a child leaping from a boat with joy. But it can remind me, in the stillness of early morning, why that image mattered. Why I pressed the shutter. Why I still believe that ethics and empathy belong not just in how we tell stories, but why we tell them at all.

Ian Kydd Miller