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The Terrible Creative is a storytelling podcast for photographers, designers, and creative professionals working through the parts of the creative process no gear review or business course ever covers.
Each episode is 30 to 40 minutes. Solo. Story-driven. Built around mental health, artistic identity, and what honest work costs in a career rewarding performance over truth.
This is not a photography podcast about cameras, presets, or client strategy. This is a podcast about the inner experience of being a creative professional, made for the mid-career photographer or designer who has mastered the technical side but lost the thread.
Hosted by Patrick Fore, commercial photographer, author, and former lead photographer and brand designer for Taylor Guitars. His work has appeared globally for clients like Nike, Petco, and Verizon. He built this show because none of the podcasts he found addressed the real problem.
If you are a photographer or creative professional who feels competent on the outside and quietly lost on the inside, you are a Terrible Creative. This is your podcast.
Paul Delaroche walked into a room in Paris in 1839 a successful painter, and walked out convinced his profession was over.
The room was the French Academy of Sciences. What he saw was Louis Daguerre (De Gare) demonstrating something didn’t even have a name yet. A silver-coated copper plate. Light. Mercury vapor. And an image — fixed, permanent, impossibly precise — that no human hand had made.
He made a good living painting melodrama. Kings getting beheaded. Queens in towers. The kind of theatrical historical scenes wealthy people paid to hang in their houses so they could feel cultured. He was very good at it. His work sold. His name meant something.
And standing in that room, he understood immediately that the thing Daguerre (DeGare) was showing the world could do what he did — capture a face, a moment, a scene — in about twenty minutes. Without training. Without years of apprenticeship. Without a human being in the room at all, really, beyond someone to work the chemistry.
The story goes that he walked out and said, "From today, painting is dead."
Except he probably never said it.
Historians have traced that quote and can't find a reliable source for it. It appears to have been invented — or at least embellished — decades later. What we know is that Delaroche did see early daguerreotypes, did understand their implications, and did eventually come to embrace photography rather than reject it.
But the quote survived anyway. Because it was true enough. It doesn’t need to be true. But it does press on a pain point that so many people are feeling. It named something real — the terror of watching a machine do what you spent your life learning to do
"From today, painting is dead."
Or maybe a 2026 version is
“From today, photography is dead.”
And like a lot of us, I've been thinking about that a lot lately.
Because right now, our version of that room is maybe a networking event and a conversation on Threads, murmurings in the halls at conferences like WPPI. Really thought it’s all of us trying to figure out what to say about AI. And the quotes we keep reaching for — "AI will never replace real creativity," "the human eye can't be replicated," "clients will always want authenticity" — I wonder sometimes though …
Is this actually a fundamental misunderstanding or misreading of whats really going on.
That maybe it’s not the death of photography, but it’s not walking into the future with our hands covering our eyes pretending not to see whats going on.
Daguerre (De Gare), by the way, was not a scientist. He was a showman. Before the daguerreotype he ran a theater in Paris called the Diorama — enormous translucent paintings, seventy feet wide, lit from behind with lamps and colored filters to create the illusion of moving light. Sunrise over cathedrals. Midnight mass with candles slowly appearing in an empty church. Crowds paid to watch a painting pretend to be alive.
Which makes it strange right? and maybe fitting, ironic, that he's the man who upended painting.
He also didn't work alone. The foundational research came from a quieter man named Niépce — who captured the first permanent photographic image years earlier, using a process that took eight hours of exposure time. The crazy part in this whole thing is that Daguerre partnered with him, learned from him, and when Niépce died, kept going. His contribution was getting the exposure down from eight hours to twenty minutes. Eight hours is a laboratory curiosity. Twenty minutes is a commercial execution.
Their commercial utility had been automated. Not by a smarter, faster, more talented competitor. But by a bath of chemistry and a few minutes of daylight.
But the ending of this story is the one we all know. Painting survived by becoming - let’s be honest - useless at documentation and finding out what it was actually for. Impressionism, (which we talked about in the last episode) and Surrealism, Cubism — the work we study now — didn't come from painters getting faster or cheaper. It came from painters who had no choice but to ask a harder and much more interesting question: what does a brush do that light cannot?
Really though, these artists traded the record for an opinion.
My name is Patrick Fore, and this is The Terrible Creative — formerly The Terrible Photographer. If you're wondering why I changed the name, there's a bonus episode that explains the full thinking. The short version: it was never really a photography podcast. I mean it started that way, but it quickly became something else. I will never tell you what camera to buy or how to photograph a bear catching a salmon in its mouth. What we're doing here is something bigger — what it means to be human and a photographer, or a designer, or a writer, or a teacher. Any of us trying to make something honest in a world that keeps asking for something safe. Which, as it turns out, is a pretty good segue into what we're doing today.≈
Today is Episode 56. I'm calling it "The Audit."
Today we're talking about three things: mirrors, reckoning, and what happens when the floor shifts under work you thought was solid.
To do that, we're going to Paris in 1839 to watch painting die — and then come back to life as something nobody expected. Then we're coming to the present, to a portfolio I've been scrolling through with a question I didn't know I was asking until last weekend. And we're going to sit with something I don't think anyone in this industry is saying out loud yet: that the fear underneath every AI conversation right now isn't really about the future. It's recognition. It's about work that was already becoming replaceable before AI had anything to do with it.
And as always — this isn't just a show for photographers. If you're a designer, a writer, a filmmaker, anyone who makes things for a living and has ever wondered whether the thing you're making still has a pulse — you're in the right place.
If this is your first episode — welcome. If you want to know where to start, go back to Episode 40. It's the first in a four-part series called The Long Middle. It's about creative loneliness — what happens when you're good at what you do and something still feels off. It connects to everything we're talking about today. As always, email is in the show notes. I read everything
Last weekend I was in a room with part of the leadership team at Capture One. The people who are literally designing the tools photographers will use for the next decade. These are people who live at the exact intersection of technology and photography — who are making real decisions, right now, about what this craft looks like in five years.
I went in with questions. I came out with something different.
I came out genuinely excited.
And I want to be specific about what the excitement was, because it wasn't "AI is going to save photography" and it wasn't "technology will figure it out." It was something quieter than that. The best version of those conversations isn't about what the software can do. It's about what the software should focus on. The drag. The friction between the moment and the file. Sort faster. Export cleaner. Capture more efficiently. Handle the operational weight so the brain doesn't have to. Because every minute you spend managing a workflow is a minute you're not seeing. Not deciding. Not being in the room in the way that actually matters.
That's where the freedom lives. Not in a new feature. In the removal of the obstacle between the photographer and the photograph.
Not more varnish. More space."
Because the software can't produce an image so honest, so specific, so true to a single moment that it touches someone in a way they can't explain. That part has never lived in the tool. And the tools that try to replicate it — that study the most legendary works of photography and build a button to approximate them — those tools are chasing the ghost of someone else's decision. You can't toggle into a point of view.
And for me, the various conversations kept coming back to the same question.
"Is the utility of photography dead? Are we the new Delaroche?"
I drove home with that question still warm.
When I got home I sat on the couch and picked up my iPad. My website happened to be open. I tapped into the gallery and started scrolling. And the questions kept coming. Not the clean philosophical kind. The ugly practical kind.
Where do I fit into all of this? How do I leverage AI without becoming replaceable by it? Is AI killing the parts of photography that needed to die anyway? And if it can replicate my work — not someday, now, today — what am I actually doing? How do you ride the bull without getting trampled?
I don't have clean answers to any of those.
What I had, sitting on that couch, was a gallery full of my own work and a question I wasn't sure I wanted to answer.
Some of it held up. Images I know should be there.
But some of it didn't deserve to be there.
There's an image I made — I'm not going to tell you the client, the shoot, the year. But I can describe it. Clean. Well-lit. Technically precise. A person in a specific environment doing a specific thing that communicates a specific brand message. The client was happy. The creative director sent a one-line email that said "perfect." I invoiced, got paid, moved on.
I typed a description of that image into Gemini.
Four minutes. Fifteen percent away from what I made. Maybe ten, if I kept going.
It’s a specific kind of hollow. You’re looking at a frame the client put on a pedestal—a shot they’re calling 'perfect'—and you realize you strangled the life out of it somewhere between the first shutter click and the final export. It wasn't the client’s fault. The image survived the brief. It just didn't survive the 'professionalism'—that internal instinct to sand down the truth until it was smooth enough to be safe.
And if I'm being honest, it wasn't just the client work. When I kept scrolling into the personal stuff — the images I made when nobody was asking for anything — I found some of the same thing. The same safe compositions. The same comfortable distance from anything that might have been difficult or strange or true.
That one surprised me more than the Gemini test did.
[CALL INSERT HERE]
[AUDIO START: Phone ringing... "Hey, Patrick?"]
I needed to know if I was just talking to myself. So I called a friend.
This is Morgan Turner. He's been shooting commercial work for a while. Long enough to have watched a lot of supposedly game-changing tools come and go. I didn't warn him. I just called.
[AUDIO: Patrick: "Listen, I’m looking at your site. And I have some questions.
I want you to think about the last three jobs or images you posted. If I typed those briefs into AI - you know, Google or whatever, right now, how close do you think AI gets to recreating them?"]
[AUDIO: Pause. The friend’s voice starts to answer...]
[AUDIO: Patrick: "Yeah, but specifically—your work. Could the machine replace the file you delivered?"]
[AUDIO: Patrick: "Tell me about a choice you made on a shoot recently that the client didn't ask for. Something they didn't even notice, not in the scope. An image that you wanted to make just because you thought it should exist.]
When did you last bring a point of view to a job rather than just bring a skill?
[NARRATION]: That’s the Audit. It’s the gap between bringing a skill and bringing a point of view. And as we talked, the silence in the right places started to tell me more than the answers.
[AUDIO: Conversation continues... perhaps he turns it back on you...]
[NARRATION]: He asked me the same thing. And I didn't have a good answer.
[AUDIO: Final exchange. "Talk soon, man." Hang up.]
"You shoot a lot of landscapes. Personal work — no client, no brief. When you're out there making those images, what are you actually after? And do you think AI changes what that means — or changes why you go out at all?"
Let it sit after you ask it. Don't fill the silence.
What to listen for:
If he talks about light, composition, technical decisions — he's still in the brief mindset. Gently push: "But why that particular moment? Why that particular place?"
Here's the question I actually want to ask. Harder than "can AI replace us."
Were we already shooting like AI before AI showed up?
Because I think we were.
A sea of images from photographers that we saw daily, sometimes hourly on our phones from amateura and pro, for years - rewired how we saw. Not just in the comparison and self-doubt way, though that was real too. In a more systemic way. It trained us, consciously or not, to shoot like everyone else.
The cheaper gear, the smartphone cameras, the platforms that handed us an audience — all of it had a cost we didn't notice we were paying. We stopped shooting for truth and started shooting for algorithmic legibility. For trends and hashtags. For the scroll.
Overcast landscapes. Latte art on distressed wooden tables. Laundromats at night with neon signs. Moody portraits, shallow depth of field, flat grey skies. Safe compositions. Exaggerated negative space. Desaturated warm tones. Work that looked like it came from a discount art store. Professional-ish. Consumable. Forgettable.
And the market rewarded us for it.
We rewarded us for it. By likes. By follower counts. By convincing ourselves we were innovative.
What we were actually doing was handing Instagram — and every other platform — billions of images to learn from. We built the training data. We formed the pattern. We fabricated the cage and then acted surprised when something climbed inside and started replicating the lock.
AI didn't invent average. It just harvested the billions of images we posted, liked, and commented on, and figured out — in a very clear, data-driven way — what "quality" looks like. Now it outputs a varnished, blended version of all that generic professional-ish work back at us, and we're supposed to compete with it.
Here's my controversial take. The photographers who built portfolios and careers on that professional-ish work will be the first to feel it. Because that's exactly what AI has been training on since those early days when we were all so thrilled to be sharing our incredible photos online.
AI didn't create the current landscape of professional photography. It just held up a god-damned mirror and showed us what we've been making for a decade.
The fear and confusion you hear in the conversations at networking events and the conference panels? That’s recognition. It’s the photographer who spent fifteen years building a 'consistent' aesthetic realizing that consistency is now a twenty-dollar subscription.
Underneath all the defensiveness is the one question we aren’t asking in public: Was my work already that replaceable? Or did I make it that way?
I’m pointing that question at myself first. That’s not false modesty. When I audit my own portfolio, the images that fail aren't technical failures. They’re the ones where I showed up as a professional and left myself outside. I didn't get beat by a machine; I just stopped being a person."
Delaroche was right about the blast radius. He knew the daguerreotype—Louis Daguerre’s silver-plated heist—was the thing that would change the trajectory of human history. But he was dead wrong about what was actually going to end up in the grave.
What died wasn't painting. What died was painting's obligation to document. To record. To be the thing you commissioned when you needed evidence that something had existed. The camera took that job, and painting was forced — furious, disoriented, without a business model — to figure out what it was actually for.
Monet didn't paint water lilies because he couldn't photograph them. He painted them because photography couldn't do what he was doing. He was painting perception itself. The way light doesn't illuminate things so much as create them. The way a surface shifts in the seconds you're looking at it. The way your memory of a place feels more present than the place itself.
That's not a consolation prize. That's not "painting found a niche." That's the thing painting had always been capable of and never fully committed to until it had no other choice.
We're at that moment. Not as a metaphor. As a structural reality.
The commodity work is going to get absorbed. Not all at once, not everywhere, not without a fight — but directionally, yes. And fighting it is like portrait painters in 1840 arguing that their brushwork was more accurate than the daguerreotype. You're not wrong. It just doesn't matter anymore.
Yesterday, I photographed a woman. A professor at a local university. In her fifties. She had never had portraits taken. Ever.
Sit with that for a second. Decades of a life. A career. An intellect. And nobody had ever forced the world to stop and pay her the kind of specific, unhurried attention that a camera demands. She’d been a professional for thirty years, but she’d never been a subject.
We shot outside—a concrete bench, students and colleagues buzzing past us, the ordinary, indifferent movement of a campus in the afternoon. I was using what I call "aspirational lighting." It was motivated by the scene, natural-feeling, but with that extra flourish that makes a portrait feel elevated. Quality lighting. Exposed properly. Technically, it was exactly the kind of 'varnish' that AI is currently harvesting. And if that’s all I’m delivering, I’m in trouble. Because the file? The file is just the box the thing arrives in. The work—the real work—was happening in the space between the frames.
But the file isn't the point. The file is just the delivery device.
Between frames, we talked. I wasn’t just checking my highlights; I was asking her about her kids. About why she chose her field. About whether her husband—who had lived his whole life in Salt Lake City—was finally ready to try ceviche now that they’d moved to a city with an actual coastline.
She laughed. Not a "pose." Not a brand-approved smile. It was a real, jagged moment of joy that changed the shape of her whole face. In that second, I made a frame that only existed because I was standing there, carrying a specific curiosity at a specific point in a specific afternoon.
AI cannot care about her husband's dinner plans. It cannot be curious about the thirty years she spent becoming an expert. It cannot decide—instinctively, in the moment—which question will finally crack the "professional" mask and let the human out.
What she walked away with wasn't just a JPG. It was the experience of being witnessed by a human being who decided she was the most important thing in the room. That is the one competitive advantage that doesn't erode. That is the work that requires you to be in the room.
There's a photograph Christopher Anderson made inside the White House. Part of a series he shot of the Trump administration — access most photographers never get, inside rooms most people never see.
The subject is standing formally against a pale wall. Hands clasped. Composed. Performing authority for the camera the way powerful people learn to perform authority — automatically, without thinking about it. The framing is clean. The light is considered. On the surface, it looks like a portrait.
But Anderson left a light switch in the frame. Right there, level with her shoulder, in plain sight. A retoucher would have removed it in thirty seconds. An AI would never have included it to begin with. Anderson left it because he understood that a light switch next to power is a comment. Not a flaw.
And then — in the open doorway behind her, half-swallowed by shadow — Anderson himself. His own reflection. On a phone. Present in his own image but not announced, a shadow while his subject stands in the light.
He made himself disappear into the frame he was building. And in doing so, he pulled the whole thing apart at the seams.
The subject trusted him. She stood still. She had no idea what was happening behind the surface of that photograph.
AI would give you the aspirational version. Even light. Clean background. Nothing in the frame that doesn't serve the subject's preferred self-image. A portrait that flatters the institution.
Anderson made a portrait that interrogates it. Quietly. Without announcing itself. With the specific humility of a photographer who understands that his job isn't to make the subject look the way they want to look — it's to see what's actually there.
The professor and Anderson aren't the same argument. The professor is about presence — earning trust, making someone feel seen. But Anderson isn't making his subject feel seen. He's seeing past what she's chosen to show. That requires something else entirely. A point of view sharp enough to know what the light switch means, and the nerve to leave it in.
That's a strategic sacrifice. Not a mistake. I want to be precise about this distinction, because it matters.
Photographers don't make great work by accident. We make it through deliberate choices that don't survive a typical brief. The journalist in a dark room who sacrifices shutter speed for the moment. The portrait photographer who lets the double chin be a double chin because the honesty of it matters more than the flattery. The shooter who chooses the grainy frame over the clean one because the grain is the truth of that room at that hour. Maybe it's being brave enough to show a side of someone that they might consider terrible.
Those aren't errors. Those are decisions that require you to know what you're after well enough to give something up to get there.
AI is frictionless. It produces the statistically likely image. The averaged result of everything it's ingested. It doesn't sacrifice. It doesn't wait. It cannot be subversive because subversion requires a position, and a position requires a person with something at stake.
You cannot prompt that into existence.
AI has studied every photograph ever made. It cannot have your specific Tuesday in November when everything was slightly off and the light was doing something nobody asked for. It cannot have the version of that shoot where you almost packed up at three in the afternoon because it felt like it was dying — and then something shifted. A subject relaxed. You made a choice the brief didn't ask for, and something true fell into the frame.
It cannot have your brother. It cannot have the version of you that was twenty-three and broke and shooting everything because you didn't know yet what you were doing wrong. It cannot have the two hours you spent waiting for a cloud to move that nobody on the creative brief knew you were waiting for.
That's not sentiment. That's the competitive advantage that compounds instead of erodes.
I drove home from that weekend thinking about what I want to shoot next.
Not in the abstract. Specifically. What do I want to make that could only exist because I was in the room? What does that brief feel like? What kind of conversation do I need to have with a subject to get to the frame that couldn't have been generated, because the frame doesn't exist without what happened in the ten minutes before it?
The question is a few weeks old. I don't have clean answers.
But I stopped opening my portfolio looking for my best work to put on a new page. I started opening it looking for the images that have a pulse. Trying to trace the line between what I made when I was fully in the room and what I made when I was executing someone else's vision of the room.
That line is clearer than I wanted it to be.
The conversation about AI and photography has been happening at the wrong altitude. Markets, economics, will there be jobs, is this the end of stock photography — those are real questions. But they're the surface conversation. They're what you talk about when you're not ready to talk about the thing underneath.
The thing underneath is: what were you making before AI arrived, and why?
Not your best work. Your typical work. The work you made on the average Tuesday when there wasn't anything special about the brief and you showed up and did your job. Does it have a point of view? Does it have anything in it that required you specifically — or could it have been executed by any competent photographer with the same gear and the same brief?
That's the audit. Not "can AI replicate my portfolio." But "is there enough of me in my portfolio that there's something to replicate?"
I sat with that for about four days before I could look at it straight.
Don't outrun the technology. Stop running. Go back to the shoot where something went sideways and you stayed anyway. Go back to the frame you almost didn't take. Go back to the version of you that hadn't yet learned to pre-visualize the grid.
That's where the work is. Not ahead of you. Behind you, waiting to be understood.
And for those of you who started after 2012—the ones who were born into the fever—I know it’s harder.
You’ve never known a world where a photograph didn’t have to perform. To you, the grid isn’t a tool; it’s a mother tongue. You were trained to pre-visualize the "like" before you even learned how to see. You’ve been living in the cage since day one, and you’ve gotten so good at decorating the bars that you’ve forgotten they’re there.
But look closer. Somewhere in your archives, there is a glitch. A frame that’s too dark, too quiet, or too jagged to ever survive the scroll. Maybe you didn't even post it because you were afraid it was "unprofessional."Look at that one. That’s not a technical failure. That is the only part of you the algorithm hasn't colonized yet.
There's a photograph somewhere in your past—maybe recent, maybe years ago—that you made when you weren't thinking about the brief or the metrics or whether it would fit. Something happened in front of your camera and you were present enough, awake enough, and human enough to catch it.
You know the one I mean.
That frame is the only piece of evidence you’ve got that says you were actually in the room. It’s the one jagged edge left in a career that’s been sanded smooth. If you’re looking for a way back to yourself, that’s the only door left unlocked.
Stay curious. Stay courageous. Stay terrible.