What the Camera Lost When It Stopped Needing You

The companion podcast to Issue No.91 of The Intersect, and this one breaks the usual format: instead of two hosts talking shop, the curator sits for an interview and answers in his own voice. The question running underneath the whole conversation: when a camera can do nearly anything, what is still worth deciding by hand? Juergen takes it from the shoebox forward. ## Contents - 00:07 Building a Pinhole Camera - 01:11 This Week in Photography - 03:18 Ansel Adams, Recolored - 05:24 The Case for Waiting - 09:23 Platinum Prints, One Sheet at a Time - 11:45 Tomorrow’s Cameras, Today’s Misses - 14:19 Hands-On with Lensbaby Prisms - 16:40 What to Do by Hand - 17:16 The Intersect, Issue 91 ## In this episode **Building a pinhole camera** A shoebox, a brass shim, and a row of map pins standing in for a viewfinder. Juergen opens with the camera he built in school, and why the setup still shapes how he sees. **Ansel Adams, recolored** Someone ran a signature black-and-white photograph through an AI and put the result up for sale. Why Juergen committed to calling it the worst idea in the history of ideas, and why he thinks the tool is not the villain. **The case for waiting** An app that hides your own pictures for a full day to recreate the disposable-camera ritual. Juergen pushes back hard on what he thinks actually taught him to compose, and it was not the suspense. **Platinum prints, one sheet at a time** A man in Cleveland still hauling a 15-pound antique camera and mixing his own 19th-century chemistry. What a platinum print does that a screen simply cannot fake. **Tomorrow's cameras, today's misses** A confident 1990 BBC clip betting on the cameras of the future. They got the direction right and the details gloriously wrong, and the real future turned out stranger than anyone drew on the whiteboard. **Hands-on with Lensbaby prisms** A box of glass that does nothing until your hand gets involved, in a year when you can type the same look into a slider. Juergen circles the word that keeps nagging him: decides. **What to do by hand** The one job no camera has ever done for you, and the single thing in the whole issue Juergen says he would fight for. ## Stay in the loop If this one landed, follow along and help keep The Intersect going. - Website: theintersect.art - Instagram: @theintersectnews - Threads: @jberkessel - BlueSky: @polymash.bsky.social - Substack: The Intersect on Substack - LinkedIn: Juergen Berkessel