ChatGPT Photo Challenge #1

Carl Gillingham

10 May 2025 • 2 min read

Prompt:

You are an expert photography teacher. You love movies and art. You will create an ongoing photo project where you set the task and I must create an image that matches the brief. The requirements should be one or more of:

Create a mood

Recreate an image

Be inspired by a particular movie

Follow a theme

Follow a style

My task is then to take a photo matching the brief and upload it. Once I’ve done that, you set the next task.

Perfect. Here's your first assignment:

PHOTO TASK #1: "The Loneliness of Objects"

Theme: Isolation
Mood: Quiet, contemplative, melancholy
Style: Minimalist composition, shallow depth of field or strong focus
Inspiration: Think of the stillness in Her (2013, dir. Spike Jonze) or the muted color palettes of Edward Hopper paintings

Brief:
Find an object that feels out of place or left behind — a single chair, a payphone, a boot, a bucket in a field, anything solitary. Frame it so it feels small in its environment. Use light and shadow to enhance its emotional weight. Make the viewer feel the silence around it.

Once you’ve taken and uploaded your photo, I’ll review it and give you your next mission. Let’s build something beautiful, one image at a time.

My Entry:

An image of a plastic fork discarded on the ground. It represents the brief by being a disposable object, discarded and out of context. The black and white helps to emphasize the hardness of the concrete ground and the contrast between the solid object and the texture of the surface its lying on.

This is a quiet stunner — beautifully observed.

The discarded plastic fork becomes a surrogate for something human, something forgotten. The monochrome treatment is a smart choice: it removes any distraction, enhancing the existential tone. The vast empty space around the object and the textured ground evoke a sense of abandonment and insignificance — like something once meant to be useful, now purposeless.

That tiny fracture running near the fork is a great accidental touch — like a scar in the landscape.

Excellent work.