William Daniels

30/05/2026

26/04/2026

Snapshots from a shot trip to Chernobyl and around, 2014.
Today marks 40 years since the Chernobyl disaster. On April 26, 1986, at 1:23 AM, a routine safety test spiraled into the worst nuclear disaster in history.

07/04/2026

Latest set of pictures of the ‘Landscape Therapy’ project, photographed at D+221, D+222, D+223, after the end of the Corbieres fire. This ongoing and long-term series draws on an analogy with exposure therapy: revisiting a traumatic site in order to lessen its anxious charge and recover a sense of orientation towards the future.
(…) For millennia, fire has shaped Mediterranean landscapes, but in a region warming faster than the global average, the 2025 Corbières fire — spreading at an unprecedented pace and devouring 16,000 hectares in less than twenty-four hours — raises urgent questions about the future of landscape itself (…) Photographed over time, at different stages of regeneration, these landscapes borrow the codes of the picturesque while being unsettled by the traces of catastrophe, questioning whether the “beautiful view” can still remain a place of refuge in an age of climate disruption.

02/04/2026

WHAT YOU CAN DO

This is a fight photographers can win.

Here’s where to start.

Before you sign anything – whether it’s a publication contract or a commercial client agreement – look for these terms:

— “Work Made for Hire”
— “Unlimited sublicensing rights”
— No AI carve-out or opt-out provision

Any one of these is a red flag. All three together make the current WSJ contract.

You have the right to ask questions, push back, strike clauses from a contract, and negotiate.

Add an AI clause to your own contracts now. This is the single most effective thing you can do immediately to protect your work from AI training use.

“Client agrees not to use any Work Product created by Photographer in connection with artificial intelligence or machine learning systems, including for training, generating, or manipulating visual content. This restriction applies in perpetuity.”
Your Visual Colleagues is an anonymous organizing collective representing freelance photographers in this dispute and beyond.

If you work as a freelancer for publications, this fight is yours too.

Share this series, and visit the links in our bio to get involved: bit.ly/yourvisualcolleagues and bit.ly/yvcjoin

Copy this language. Use it.

01/04/2026

Work Made for Hire wasn’t designed with AI in mind.

But it’s the perfect instrument for it.

Here’s how it works:
WMFH makes the publication the legal author of your photographs. Combined with unlimited sublicensing rights — standard in many new contracts — the publication can license your work to any third party, for any purpose, without your consent and without sharing revenue.

That includes AI training.

This isn’t theoretical. News Corp — parent company of the Wall Street Journal — has signed a $250 million deal with OpenAI and a $50 million annual deal with Meta to license editorial content, including for AI training.

Photographs were excluded from the OpenAI deal — in part because the previous WSJ freelance contract didn’t permit it.

The new contract makes photographs fair game for AI training.

Publications introducing WMFH contracts will tell you it’s necessary to protect their archives — to prevent photographers from reclaiming decades of content after 35 years.

This is a legal fiction. Joint copyright achieves archival protection without stripping authorship. WMFH is a choice — and it’s one that also happens to enable unlimited AI licensing with no obligation to notify you, compensate you, or ask.

The joint copyright model the NYT uses isn’t just better for termination rights. It may be functioning as a meaningful barrier to AI training today — in ways that WMFH cannot provide.

31/03/2026

AI is changing photography.
So are the contracts that determine who owns an image.
Across the industry, photographers are receiving contracts that classify our work as “Work Made for Hire.” It sounds like legal boilerplate. It isn’t.

Work Made for Hire means the publication — not you — is the legal author of your photographs.

This matters for four reasons:

You lose your copyright.
You lose your archive.
You lose control of how your work is used — including for AI training.
And you lose the ability to protect the people you photograph.
For photographers working in vulnerable communities, that last point isn’t secondary. Using editorial images to train AI can fuel surveillance tools that put sources and entire communities at risk. WMFH removes your ability to prevent this exploitation.
This impacts all photographers. Photojournalists and commercial photographers face parallel risks – through stock agreements, client contracts, and sublicensing terms that increasingly permit AI training use without consent or compensation.

We’ve already seen AI ad campaigns by major companies including Coca-Cola, Unilever, and Skechers. It’s not hard to imagine a future in which AI takes the place of photographers, models, stylists, creative directors, and designers.

This isn’t hypothetical. The Wall Street Journal recently introduced exactly this kind of contract to its freelance photographers — while its parent company negotiated a $50 million a year deal to license editorial content to Meta for AI training.

The more photographers who know about this, the harder it becomes to ignore. Follow the links in ’s bio or go to bit.ly/yourvisualcolleagues to take action.

30/03/2026

AI is changing photography. Not someday. Right now.
 
News organizations are claiming the right to use your images to train AI. Brands are replacing photographers with generated content. Deepfakes are eroding trust in documentary work.
 
This isn’t a distant threat. It’s already happening.
 
But AI’s destructive force isn’t inevitable. The rules around it are still being written – by lawmakers, corporations, and us.
 
Photographers have the right to shape how this technology intersects with our work and our industry.
 
Beyond our industry, AI causes harm: misinformation, nonconsensual imagery, and environmental damage from data centers that consume enormous amounts of water, electricity, and rare earth minerals.
 
AI can help with keywording, transcription, research, and administrative work. New tools deserve honest evaluation. Some artists even create bodies of work through AI, though not without controversy.
 
But the benefits don’t cancel out the harm.
 
Photography is built on things AI can’t replicate: human creativity, the lessons learned through making art, and genuine connection with our sources.
 
If we don’t protect those things, no one will.
 
The connection between AI and photography runs through your contract.
 
Over the next few days, we’ll look into Work Made For Hire contracts and AI. WMFH has always been a bad deal for photographers, but now such rights-grabbing clauses quietly open the door to AI training without consent or compensation.
Join us in our efforts. Start now by following the links in ’s bio: bit.ly/yourvisualcolleagues for resources about these issues and bit.ly/yvcjoin to get on our mailing list.

17/03/2026

It’s always fascinating to come across old, forgotten pictures and see how they’ve aged, or whether they still have an interest today.
While working on a portfolio for a special project, I ended up on those mostly unpublished pictures shot over the last two decades in Libya, Syria, Sudan, Burkina Faso, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, and the Philippines, sometimes on assignment for magazine , National Geographic, , or for some personal projects.

13/03/2026

This is with sadness and anger that I heard the passing of Father Pierre El Raï, whom I met in 2024 in South Lebanon with and during the previous war between Israel and Hezbollah.

Père Pierre was such a nice person, sympathetic, concerned, and touching (first time I met a father who smokes ci******es every five minutes!). Like his parishioners, he didn’t want to leave his Christian village of Qlayaa, and was killed by an Israeli strike, after he came to help other Christians who had been struck just minutes before him.

The war is also a mediatic one, despite the proofs, the Israeli army refuses to admit their mistake.

Thanks, friend .sarradin for writing on this new blunder in Libé.

11/03/2026

Les inscriptions sont ouvertes pour la prochaine session de Raconter le Réel, une formation dédiée à la photographie documentaire, animée par William Daniels.
Pensée pour accompagner les photographes dans le développement d'un projet personnel, cette formation vous guide pas à pas vers la construction d'un documentaire photographique abouti.
* Un programme en 3 temps, réparti sur 6 jours :
* Une immersion dans les codes et les écritures du documentaire photographique, à travers l'analyse de projets et de cas concrets.
* Le développement de votre propre série :
* recherche de sujet, choix narratifs, construction du regard et du récit visuel.
* Des conseils pour valoriser et diffuser votre travail, et créer des opportunités autour de votre projet.

Dates :
8 & 9 juin 21 & 22 septembre 8 & 9 décembre
Lieu : Paris