Does reality exist?

Breikinnbu, cabin in the Amotsdalen

Photography has always had an unusual relationship with reality. In an age where artificial intelligence can generate landscapes that never existed, skies that were never seen, and moments that never happened, the question seems more relevant than ever: what is still real? At first glance, this photograph may not help much in answering that question.

The stars sweep across the sky in long arcs. The northern lights glow above the mountains. A small cabin emits a warm light in the darkness. Yet none of this is what the scene looked like in a single moment. The image was created by leaving the shutter open for more than an hour. During that time the Earth continued its silent rotation, turning points of light into circles. The camera recorded something our eyes could never see: the passage of time itself.

Photography has always done this. In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge created a series of photographs of a galloping horse. For the first time, people could see that during a full stride all four hooves leave the ground simultaneously. It was a revelation. Not because it was new, but because it had always been there, beyond the limits of human perception. Was that photograph reality? Or was it something more than reality? The same question applies here. The stars were real. The northern lights were real. The cabin was real. The mountains were real. Yet nobody standing beside me would have seen this exact image. The camera collected sixty-seven minutes of light and compressed them into a single frame. Long before artificial intelligence arrived, photography had already begun reshaping reality. Today AI can create images that never existed. It can imitate photographs so convincingly that we increasingly question whether what we see actually happened. Perhaps the real challenge is no longer whether an image looks real, but whether there was a real experience behind it.

And that brings me to what I know with certainty.

For four days, my oldest son and I stayed in this small cabin in the Norwegian mountains. No mobile coverage. No notifications. No headlines. No endless scrolling. Just mountains, silence, changing weather, playing chess, and long conversations.

Whether this photograph represents reality is open to debate. That those four days happened is not.

And perhaps that is what photography is truly about. Not proving what was there. But remembering what mattered.

Technical details: Nikon Z9, 14-24mm F2.8 at 14mm. F2.8, 67m. ISO800.