Over the years I've seen a lot of photographers who claim to be storytellers. This is, of course, a great thing. People love stories and we need them. Here comes the but...but many storytellers I've seen don't actually take the time to tell stories with their images - they just tell stories in their captions. This is a critical line to be drawn, I think. In my view, you can't tell a story visually with one image. You can caption the hell out of it but it doesn't mean that a story is being told visually. In this medium, you need multiple images if you're going to visually tell a story otherwise you're merely providing part of the narrative. After all, a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end, right? Unless you're Quentin Tarantino.

Sometimes it's best to put your walk on hold and photograph in just one area for just a bit. Maybe there's an interesting person. It could be a painter painting a wall or climbing up and down a ladder. Whatever it may be, there's usually a pattern unfolding or a person or thing of interest that anchors the scene, and the photographer wants to capture as many of these moments of interest as possible.

When asked what my favorite place is in Kolkata, it's an easy answer for me as a photographer: the Dhakuria Railway Colony. This settlement has been here for what I presume to be decades, having existed long before my discovery of it around 2011 or so. It took me a few years to get the courage up to go down and wander around the place and take pictures, but after doing so for the first time, I've made it a point to do so at every opportunity whenever I visit.

If you've ever visited Howrah Station and taken the bridge across to reach there, you may have noticed the intermittent but neverending stream of porters sluffing bags to and from the station. When you get up close and personal with them, you get to see how hard and tiring that kind of work is.

Was artificial intelligence and art a mistake? The question is posed to you in the past tense because to be asking this question like nothing has happened yet would be missing the point entirely: artists and non-artists alike have been experimenting with AI art generated from text prompts for several months now on platforms like Dall-E 2 and Midjourney. The question itself seems rather meaningless to those of us who’ve already indulged. And my message to my audience is that the question has already been answered by tens of thousands of people — likely to be by the millions soon enough — before the rest of the world can wrap their collective heads around it.

I’ve been experimenting with several of the AI platforms, attempting to learn all that I can about how the systems work and how to produce the best images from the prompts that I provide. My favorite platform is Midjourney, which is what I used to create the images for this poem.

Reflections are generally my friends when it comes to photography. I’m always inspecting them to see if there’s something that can be done.

Giving "Man" first billing is being gracious of me simply because if I'd provided full context, you'd easily notice that the machine part of the story is much larger than that of the human. The original image is of this gentleman sitting inside a large earth-mover at a construction site. As it is now, it looks to me as though he could be playing a video game. Even this could be an analogy for modern life.