How Galerio is made

Photography, publishing, and a new way of working

In 1985 I delivered a local magazine called Spectrum and, when I could, sat and watched the man who made it. One man, one computer, the whole magazine. I didn’t know it then, but I was watching desktop publishing arrive — the change that put a printing press on a desk. Forty years on, almost everything about how creative work is produced and distributed has changed again, and artificial intelligence is the biggest change I’ve worked through. And I use it.

That’s worth being open about, particularly in a magazine that puts so much weight on photography, art and visual culture.

The photographs

The photographs are photographs. I travel, walk considerable distances and spend hours photographing the places, buildings, objects and details that interest me, with professional cameras, expensive lenses and sophisticated editing software — none of which I invented or built.

I’ve never understood the argument that technology diminishes creativity. Photography has always depended on it. What matters is the experience, the observation, and the decisions made along the way. AI doesn’t take those photographs for me.

I have no objection to AI-generated imagery, either. Though it is not used here. I find it fascinating and I use it creatively. It’s another way of making images, with its own possibilities and limits, and I don’t think photography needs protecting from it.

The writing

This is where AI has made the biggest difference.

I have more than twenty thousand photographs and an almost endless list of places, artworks and subjects I’d like to write about. I also have dyslexia and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, though not so much of the hyperactivity these days. I’ve always regarded these as something of a superpower, though not without their frustrations. The ideas have never been the problem. Getting them onto the page (without my brain’s constant interruptions, and without mixing up letters and words) has been. AI has changed that considerably.

I use it to organise my thoughts, research subjects, structure articles, edit text and develop ideas. Sometimes I dictate what I want to say. Sometimes I have a long conversation about a subject before anything is written. The opinions, observations and experiences are mine; AI helps me communicate them. And yes, sometimes it writes substantial portions of the text, especially factual elements. I see no reason to conceal that.

Producing Galerio

AI is involved in much more than the writing. I use it to explore editorial ideas, plan itineraries, investigate subjects, develop visual concepts, and do the technical work of producing and publishing a magazine. I’ve also built my own publishing tools, planeditpublish.com. It lets me do things that would once have needed more time, money or people.

It isn’t automatic publishing. I decide what interests me, which photographs to use, what deserves an article, how the pages should look, and what gets published. AI can suggest. It can produce. It can also be spectacularly wrong. I remain the editor.

The question of authenticity

Recently, two people independently suggested that one of my photographs looked AI-generated. It wasn’t. I found that fascinating.

We’re entering a period when images are judged by whether they look artificial rather than by how they were made. A photograph can be genuine and look synthetic; a generated image can look convincingly photographic. Appearance tells us very little about provenance. For Galerio, the distinction is worth keeping: photography and AI-generated imagery are different forms of image-making, and I see no reason to pretend otherwise.

Not everything about AI is wonderful

I use it almost every day and I’m frequently astonished by what it can do. I’m also regularly frustrated by it. The industry makes extraordinary promises about productivity, and I’ve had days when getting AI to complete a simple task took longer than doing it myself. There’s an enormous amount of hype, superficial innovation and technology looking for a problem. I’m interested in what AI makes possible, not in what someone wants to sell me.

And no social media

Galerio isn’t on social media. It did some good, once: it let people find each other, and it let work like this find a reader without a publisher’s permission. What it is now is something else — a machine for keeping you anxious and scrolling, where a photograph lasts four seconds and the measure of it is a number underneath. I find it depressing, and I stay away from it, because it is against everything this place is for.

Galerio is slower than that. The pictures are large, there’s nothing to like, and there’s no count of who’s looked. If you want to say something, write to me — your message and my reply stay here, together. You’ll find a signpost to Galerio on Instagram and YouTube, because that’s where people still are. The work lives here.

Ultimately, it’s about curiosity

I don’t photograph places because I need more photographs. I do it because I enjoy exploring, discovering things, and looking more closely at the world. Galerio is an extension of that. AI gives me another way to investigate, create and publish what I find. It doesn’t replace the experience or the judgement, and it certainly doesn’t make every decision a good one. But it has opened up possibilities I find exciting.

No ads, no algorithm, no feed. If the work is worth something to you, a subscription pays for the next place. That’s the whole model — and everything published here remains my responsibility.