Welcome to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I'm Lila Raptopoulos.

Earlier this year, I spent a few months in the South Bronx to write a profile of an arts

institution in New York called the Bronx Documentary Center. And it made me think a lot about

photography. One of the many things this school does is offer free photo documentary classes

to middle and high school students,

teaching them how to shoot on film cameras and develop their photos in a dark room.

And the students' work is incredible.

Part of what makes it so great is that the South Bronx is one of the poorest neighborhoods in the United States,

and that means that people have assumptions about it. These photos challenge those assumptions because they're taken by the people who know it best.

Meanwhile, these days, I think we have a pretty suspicious relationship with photographic images.

Like when you're scrolling on your phone, was that photo you just saw doctored?

Is it actually an AI image? Is it made to look spontaneous, but really it was staged? This atmosphere now, it makes me wonder if the art that these kids are making in the Bronx still has a place in our jaded world. Our U.S. art critic Aurella Butick has been writing about this medium for years. She actually has a PhD in the history of photography. So I've asked her to join me today to help make sense of the landscape.

Arellia, hi. Welcome back to the show. Hi. Thanks so much for being here. It's a pleasure. So nice to have you. So I want to start by asking you about your relationship to photography. You did a PhD in the history of photography, right? Yes, I did at the Institute of Fine Arts.

I know you wrote your dissertation about Diane Arbus, one of the most famous photographers from the 1970s. And I was wondering if you to help me reflect on this

feeling that I was having while I was reporting on the Bronx Documentary Center. I felt on the one

hand, like, it was just amazing to watch these kids learn this, like, very pure form of social

documentary photography. But then on the other hand, the world that we're living in now is just

so different than it was then. Like we're all making images all day on our phones and we have

access to phone editing apps and AI. And I'm just wondering how you see that reflected in the

photography shows that you're going to these days. I think that one of the developments of now is that photographers are putting more thought

into constructing their images.

I think that there's always been some doubt about how truthful documentary photography

...