The creative world is full of questions about AI. Innocean Berlin has added a new perspective in a campaign for the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center in Budapest to promote the world’s first permanent exhibition of photography by the legendary Robert Capa.
Innocean has produced a series of images contrasting the powerful photographs taken by Capa with versions produced by an AI image generator which is fed a description of the original photo.
Capa’s celebrated photo of a shaved woman being followed by a police officer and a huge crowd during WW2 is placed alongside a poorly executed version generated using AI. Other famous Capa shots are also placed next to clumsy AI-generated versions. Each image ends with the line, “Machines don’t see the world as humans do.”
Hungarian-American war photographer and photojournalist, Robert Capa, is considered one of the greatest photojournalists of all time. He once said, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.” Capa believed that the photographer’s mission was to be right next to the action, witnessing life.
The campaign leans into this belief, highlighting the importance of the human eye and the photographer’s interaction with real-life situations – something AI can never replicate. While some see AI as the future of image generation, the campaign aims to demonstrate that the value of human photography outweighs the benefits offered by this technology.
Capa was the only photographer landing with the first wave of troops on Omaha Beach to document D-Day and throughout his career he captured extraordinary images of combat, producing images of the Spanish Civil War, Chinese resistance to Japan and World War II as well as events including the founding of Israel in 1948, the first Indochina war and documenting film productions.
The ad campaign launched on May 22 in Europe, predominantly in Hungary, and the exhibition launches on June 6 at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center in Budapest.
István Virágvölgyi, Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center artistic director, stated, “While we are always excited by the emergence of new imaging technologies, the consequences of the introduction of artificial intelligence seem unpredictable and somewhat worrying. Nevertheless, we are certain that machines will not be able to replace the kind of human vision that the great photojournalist Robert Capa embraced to passionately witness and report on important events in the world. We believe that it will always be more engaging to talk to a human being than a robot, and that a photograph taken by a real person will give us more insight into the human experience than AI-generated images.”
Ricardo Wolff, executive creative director at Innocean Berlin, added, “Capa was the first photographer at the D-Day landing due to his courage and his passion, two adjectives that set humans apart from any sort of artificial intelligence. And that’s the truth we’re clinging onto to launch this campaign: nothing beats the human experience. We’re extremely honoured to help our colleagues at RCCP in this historical moment.”
Credits:
Client: Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center
Artistic Director of the Capa Center: István Virágvölgyi
Curator of the permanent Robert Capa exhibition: Gabriella Csizek
Agency: Innocean Berlin
European Chief Creative Officer: Gabriel Mattar
Executive Creative Director: Ricardo Wolff
Creative Director: Shelley Lui
Senior Art Directors: Saymon Souza Medeiros, Ailton Henriques
Senior Copywriter: Nicolás Montanaro
Editor & Motion Designer: Carlos Suares
Creative Intern: Reka Forgach
Chief Operating Officer: Jonathan Hill
Account Director: Min Kyung Park
Senior Strategist: Odile Breffa
European Group Director of Media and Data Driven Solutions: Jürgen Zienicke
Havas Media Group Hungary Director of Strategy & Business Development: Bea Csibi
