Perfection vs Truth in Contemporary Photography
On Wednesday, I had the pleasure of speaking at a private lunch organised by Killik Family Office at the National Portrait Gallery in London. The event brought together a group of thoughtful guests for conversation, good food, and a shared visit to the Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize exhibition—where one of my photographs is currently on display.
The lunch took place at The Portrait Restaurant by Richard Corrigan, overlooking Trafalgar Square. After eating exceptionally well (this detail matters), we moved downstairs into the gallery to see the exhibition. Over lunch, I gave a short talk about my work as a portrait and documentary family photographer, and about why photography made by real people, in real moments, continues to matter—especially now, in an era increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence.
From personal story to photographic practice
My work often begins with lived experience. The photograph shown in the Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize exhibition is a portrait of my own blended, cross-cultural family. It explores themes that have shaped both my personal life and my professional practice: identity, migration, belonging, and family relationships.
With a background in psychology and cross-cultural studies, I’m deeply interested in how identity is formed—by family, culture, history, and social context. Photography allows me to explore these ideas visually, without simplifying them into slogans or surface-level narratives. Families, after all, are complex. They are built on love and devotion, but also on tension, obligation, humour, and contradiction.
That complexity is exactly what interests me as a photographer.
Documentary family photography and real life
In addition to portraiture, I specialise in documentary family photography. This means spending an entire day with a family and photographing them as they actually live—without directing, posing, or styling. No matching outfits. No perfect smiles. Just real life unfolding.
These photographs are not about perfection. They are about recognition.
Whether I’m photographing a commissioned family session or creating personal work, I think of myself first and foremost as a people photographer. What matters most is not the camera or the technical setup, but the relationships in front of the lens—and the trust that allows those relationships to be seen honestly.
Photography vs AI: perfection versus truth
A question I’m asked more and more frequently is whether I worry about being replaced by AI.
The short answer is no.
AI is already excellent—and will continue to dominate—in many areas of image-making: commercial photography, advertising, interiors, fashion, and highly polished visuals optimised for speed and scale. Even in portraiture, AI can produce images that are flawless, symmetrical, and conventionally attractive.
But photography, at its best, is not about perfection. It’s about truth.
AI optimises. Photography reveals.
We instinctively recognise authenticity. Images that feel slightly “wrong” visually often feel right emotionally, because imperfection signals reality. A photograph matters not because it is technically perfect, but because it happened—at a specific time, in a specific life, within a specific relationship.
That context cannot be generated artificially.
Why relationships matter more than images
When I photograph a family, I’m not just producing images. I’m spending time with people. I’m observing how they relate to each other—their routines, rituals, tenderness, conflicts, and silences. Over time, I often work with the same families again and again, documenting how relationships change and evolve.
That kind of trust cannot be automated.
Photography is relational. It depends on human presence, attention, and empathy. It requires listening, patience, and an ability to recognise what is meaningful in a given moment—skills that no algorithm possesses.
Photographs that last
Most images today are made to disappear. They are optimised for feeds, engagement, and instant consumption.
Photographs made intentionally age differently.
Their value increases over time because they become unaltered records of what once was—how people looked, yes, but more importantly how they lived and loved. For families especially, photographs are not about appearances; they are about memory, connection, and belonging.
If you could give your child just one photograph of yourself, what kind of image would it be? What kind of image would you want your child to grow up with? I doubt it would be a flawless, heavily retouched portrait. More likely, it would be something honest. Something recognisable.
Closing thoughts
The conversations at the Killik Family Office lunch reflected this shared belief: that meaning matters more than polish, and that human work still has a place in a technologically accelerated world.
AI will continue to shape how images are made. But the photographs that matter most—the ones we return to, the ones that carry emotional weight—will still be made the old-fashioned way: with time, care, and human presence.
And that is where photography belongs.
