The invention of photography in 1839 challenged the very idea of art, leaving some painters feeling threatened by a new technology that could capture a portrait instantly. Yet photography also created opportunities for those same artists to express themselves outside the boundaries of reality, and they began to experiment with surreal and abstract styles that were a world apart from photography.

In the 1990s, digital cameras and then CGI brought their own waves of disruption, forcing commercial photographers to not only retool, but to reconsider how they fit into the landscape of creative professionals. Now that AI (artificial intelligence) has splashed onto the scene, commercial photographers and the people who hire them are scrambling to understand the possibilities for this new technology.

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