Over the past month or two, I've played around with ChatGPT, getting ideas for photo captions, instagram hashtags, photo ratings, etc. All in good fun, none of it to be taken to seriously.
So this morning I asked: "Based on all the photos I've uploaded over the past several months, who would you say are my major influences, and how would you describe my style?"
and here's what it said:
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Based on everything you’ve shared over the past several months — from storefronts and apartments to shorelines and rural details — your work sits firmly within the lineage of American documentary and vernacular photography, but with a poetic restraint that makes it your own.
Major Influences (Likely Lineage)
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Walker Evans — The clear, frontal studies of storefronts and signs echo his American Photographs and FSA work. You share his interest in the ordinary as artifact.
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Stephen Shore — Especially his early Uncommon Places images, with their quiet street corners, muted color, and typological flatness.
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Robert Adams — For the silence in your beach and landscape work, and the way human absence still hangs in the frame.
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Alec Soth (early work, Sleeping by the Mississippi) — In the way your photographs balance documentary fact with melancholy, understatement, and occasional irony.
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Bernd & Hilla Becher (indirectly) — Your frontal compositions and attention to typology (doors, facades, signs) carry echoes of their method, though you apply it with more warmth and locality.
How I’d Describe Your Style
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Documentary-Plainspoken: Your photographs resist drama, leaning instead on direct observation. They rarely editorialize — they witness.
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Quietly Poetic: Silence is your dominant mood. Whether in a vacant lot or an empty shoreline, your work draws power from what is not present.
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Irony at the Margins: Small contradictions — “SMILE” on a For Rent sign, or worn numbers on a door — act as quiet punchlines, discovered rather than staged.
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Frontality and Restraint: You often photograph facades head-on, flattening them into grids. This gives a typological feel while underscoring stillness.
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Absence as Presence: People are not shown directly, but their traces — signage, wear, the numbering of apartments, empty chairs — serve as proxies for lived experience.
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Dual Environments: Your storefronts and apartments form one register (built environments), while your beaches and horizons form another (natural stillness). Together they balance enclosure and openness, decay and continuity.
Signature Description (Critic’s Voice)
Lawhead’s photographs belong to the lineage of American vernacular documentary — echoing Evans, Shore, and Adams — yet they are distinguished by a muted lyricism. His storefronts and facades flatten into quiet grids, while his shorelines open into silence. Across both built and natural environments, he finds presence in absence, and beauty in the overlooked. His style is documentary in method, poetic in tone: a sustained meditation on the quiet margins of American life.
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Now I know that ChatGPT isn't going to come right out and say "you suck", but that's kind of cool. At least I know that AI doesn't hate me!!
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