Upon hearing and viewing 90 Miles by Michael Christopher Brown, I completely understand why many professional photo journalists were enraged and felt that he disrespected the profession. I can also understand Brown’s misguided perspective to do something innovative for a project that he was unable to capture in real life. The comments under the picture reveal multiple interesting perspectives on the post that I believe are important to consider. @jose_ginarte posted “ I think you should publish the text prompts you entered in order to generate these images. Which left me to wonder if he hopes to reveal an underlying bias in the text prompts. And if this project would be received differently if he did initially release the prompts as captions. In my opinion, I think the captions would have created even more rage from others as they could have found issues with his wording. Pet_fish posed an interesting alternative route for Brown, “Could’ve just collaborated with a Cuban artist/painter and made similar or even more interesting work. But when you need cash fast, real people are just too damn slow lol.” This comment poses an interesting idea of how Brown could have incorporated Cubans into a report that is about them. It begs the question of why he did not attempt to include Cuban artists/ photographers in his work rather than using the excuse of no access. More importantly, it exposes the most important perspective in this chaos of an attempt of innovation. Which is the perspective of the Cuban people. By generating these images through AI, one very important piece of the photojournalism puzzle is missing… consent. Although real Cuban people were not used in the images, no actual Cubans consented to having their stories told. No Cubans had the chance to share their perspective and had their story told for them by an American white man. And that is the most central issue with what Michael Christopher Brown has done. The arguments of why he did it, whether that be for money, for exposure or for controversy are less important. Quite frankly, there’s no way to know why he did it for sure. What truly matters is the fact that he did it and it’s impact on the Cuban people he recklessly reported on.
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