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A friend recently shared a video from Simon d’Entremont, a nature and wildlife photographer, with the message: ” Every photographer should watch this. Simon had just come back from three weeks in Botswana, and the video reflected on why photography matters in a world of AI and algorithms — why picking up a camera is an act of resistance against everything designed to hijack our attention.

I watched it, and I loved it. And it got me thinking about two very different reasons a person might carry a camera — reasons that don’t compete with each other, but that we don’t talk about separately often enough.

The Joy of Making

Simon’s case is built entirely, and beautifully, around what photography gives back to the photographer. Curiosity in a world obsessed with certainty. A reason to leave the screen and stand in a forest at 5 am. Patience, in an age of instant everything. And maybe most of all, story — not the photograph itself, but everything it takes to make it. The alarm, the hike, the cold, the waiting. He tells a story about a lion nicknamed Blondie who roared him awake at 4 am near his tent, and he’s right that the roar is the better story, not the photo.

That’s a real and important truth about photography. The image is often just the receipt. The experience is the purchase. And I’ve watched this exact thing change people’s lives — I regularly hear from people managing mental health challenges or PTSD who tell me that having a camera, and a reason to use it, got them out of the house for the first time in months. That’s not a small thing. That’s photography doing something for the person holding it, and the world needs more of that, not less.

The Purpose of Witnessing

But I’ve spent more than 40 years as a photojournalist and documentary storyteller, and for that work, the center of gravity sits somewhere else entirely.

The job was never to have an experience worth remembering. It was to build enough trust with the person in front of the lens—and understand the world around them well enough—that what I brought back was honest and belonged to them, not to me. A photojournalist’s curiosity isn’t in service of their own growth. It’s in service of a question: what does someone who wasn’t there need to understand, and what does the person in the frame deserve to have understood about them?

That reframes almost everything Simon says about photography, without contradicting it. The photograph isn’t evidence that I was there. It’s a bridge between someone who lived a moment and someone who needs to see it truthfully but couldn’t be there. When a photojournalist starts centering their own experience — their own patience, their own memory, their own story — something has usually gone wrong. The work is meant to disappear behind the honesty of what it shows.

This is also, I think, why Simon’s “AI can’t generate a memory” argument, true as it is, isn’t quite the argument that matters for journalism. AI images are a threat to documentary work not because a machine lacks nostalgia, but because they threaten trust in the record itself — the audience’s basic ability to believe that what they’re looking at actually happened, to a real person, in a real place, witnessed by someone accountable for getting it right. That’s a bigger and more urgent problem than whether a machine can feel anything, and it’s the one photojournalists should be sounding the alarm about.

Both Things Can Be True

None of this makes Simon wrong. It makes photography bigger than either of us captured on our own.

For most people, most of the time, photography is exactly what Simon describes: a discipline of presence, curiosity, and appreciation in a world engineered to steal all three. That’s worth celebrating without qualification.

But for those of us who’ve built careers on the other side of the lens — where a stranger has to trust you enough to hand you their story — the camera has a different job. Not to give us an experience, but to carry someone else’s truth to people who need to see it.

Two different reasons to pick up the same tool. Both worth defending, especially now.