In this episode of The Perceptive Photographer, I sit down with Leica Ambassador Greg Hatton for an amazing conversation on what it means to be a photographer in the age of AI and Generative AI imagery. I met Greg about a year ago when he was in Seattle hosting this Process workshop at the Leica store in Bellevue in conjunction with PCNW. Greg and I spent an afternoon talking all things photography, from gear to mentors to making work that means something.

To give you a little more background, Greg is an award-winning documentary photographer and filmmaker whose work is all about people, connection and the stories that surround us. At his core, he is a storyteller. I have really appreciated learning all about his wonderful and thoughtful approach to image-making. He encourages us to look beyond the camera and really consider how we see the world, how we connect with our subjects and what we want our photographs to communicate. As you will hear, his work is deeply connected to curiosity, observation, connection and a genuine interest in people. I think he talked to at least three photographers when we were recording. He believes photography is about much more than taking a picture; it’s about learning to see, being present and understanding the story in the image.

As I said, I met Greg when he was up for his PROCESS workshop. Those workshops are all about opening up the creative journey behind photography, sharing experiences, insights and an approach to developing a more intentional and personal photographic practice. If you ever get the chance to attend, it is worth your while.

I’ve really got a lot of things to think about and process from our conversation a few weeks ago. I hope you enjoy it. You can find Greg on his site, Impaci and on Instagram. You can also see video work on YouTube and Vimeo.

Thanks for joining me this week for the Perceptive Photographer podcast. Today is November 2, 2026, which is always a rough day for me. It’s the anniversary of the day I learned about my brother’s passing. It is hard to believe that it has been nine years.

So this week’s podcast is a little random because I was struggling to figure out the motivation to record anything last week. It finally hit me that I was thinking a lot about those first days. One of the things I have been learning is that while I feel like I have done lots of work to process the emotional and psychological impacts of his passing, there is always a physical toll on me this time of year. Most years, I either get really sick or have some health issues that result in ER visits. These always seem to come up in November and December. Part of what I’m learning is that there is more that needs to be taken care of where the body remembers and hasn’t processed the grief as much as my mind has.

In learning this sum of the parts, I got to thinking about the depth of the images that resonate with me from that time in my life or anytime, for that matter. I think that’s one of the things about our photographic process that can be applied from what I’m learning every year that I go through this. That there is a depth and complexity to who we are as people and the more we are willing to understand, share and process the entirety of that complexity, the more interesting we are as individuals and therefore the more interesting we are as community members and ultimately the more interesting our art and photographs become.

This was all pretty interesting because part of what I wanted to talk about before starting to struggle with figuring out why I was having a hard time recording a podcast last week was that I was going to be talking about a quote from the book Photographers on Photography by Henry Carroll, from an interview he did with Ron Jude. He asked Ron what his favorite Photographic quote was and why, and the quote that he came up with was by Lewis Baltz.

“Anyone can take pictures; what’s difficult is thinking about them, organizing them and trying to use them in some way so that some meaning can be constructed out of them. That’s really where the work begins for an artist”

Ron then goes on to say, “What I offer as an artist doesn’t lie solely in craft or visual acrobatics. It’s in the context I create for individual images”

What really struck me with this overlap was that so much of the meaning we create, so much of the work we create, is in the understanding of the complexity in context by which we want our work to be viewed and in the context by which it was created. So I’m thinking about the multi-layered way. Grief has impacted my life. I’m also realizing how important it is for me to recognize that when my photographs have that multi-layered complexity, the more interesting they are, the more honest they are, and the more engaging. They are so, hopefully, as we talk about that podcast this week, that it’ll be something for you to get out of it that you can enjoy and apply to your own process.

A couple of quick things before we jump into the podcast.

1. if you’re gonna be in the Seattle area on November 5, don’t forget to join me at the Photographic Center Northwest for my lecture on the landscape and language and meaning.
2. In the next week to 10 days, don’t forget to check out the latest In Conversation episode of the podcast. This one is with Greg Hatton, an amazing photographer from Los Angeles, who was kind enough to join me even though he was working hard for Leica down at the Formula One races in Austin, Texas.

In this week’s episode, we’re digging into both the need to say Happy Halloween and the blind spot that impacts how we critique photographs. When we critique and look at photographs, we often have a pattern or process that we like to follow. This process can often produce pretty good results. It also allows us to see and understand photographs quickly, and then move on to the next image. However, there might be times when we run into an image where the analysis is in our blind spot. And by the blind spot, I mean something that we don’t know that we need to know because we don’t know we need to know it to examine the photograph.

Long and short of it is that I think this is a community issue. This is something that I don’t necessarily think we solve on our own because it’s hard for us to know what we don’t know. So we need to talk to other people. We need to see how they look at photographs, talk to them about how they examine photographs, look at text for people who have written about it, and see if there are things we can incorporate into our own sense of scene to evaluate the work.

I think it’s also important for us to recognize that sometimes the things that we don’t think are important in our analysis of our work might be significant. If we start with them, we might find unique and interesting ways to critique photographs. I believe this is really important because, as we look at the number of images of her being created, both photographically, with generative AI, or hybrid. The need for us photographers to have a better language, both visually and verbally, to talk about our work is important. It’s in these conversations that we learn how to be better photographers, how to appreciate photography and how to honor the work that other photographers have done.

So I hope in this episode, you find some interesting insights and some ideas that you could use to both help see where your blind spots are and help others maybe find new and exciting ways to avoid their blind spots.

I know for me it’s always about finding somebody in the community who can help me see what I couldn’t see by myself, so don’t be afraid to ask those people in the camera club, or some photographers you might know, or maybe it’s time to find some photographer friends 🙂