Is there in communication no beauty?

With the new iteration of flagship smartphone cameras comes the new iteration of arguments about reality—and not the “fun” kind that you strap to your face. Google’s Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro offer a new generation of AI editing tools, and Apple’s iPhone 15 and 15 Pro integrate the latest round of Apple’s Photonic Engine¹ and Deep Fusion to process every last detail.

What we should really be talking about when we talk about these cameras isn’t some representation of “reality,” but communication. What a person shoots with any camera is not truth, but a timed amount of light from a selected angle shining through a lens focused onto a recording medium. Even without any editing tools, you can produce a photo that is real but isn’t true entirely in camera at the time it was shot.…