Another America: AI-Generated Photos From the 1940s and 50s Tell New Stories Of The Country’s Past

“The very existence of AI has rendered both history and facts infinitely elastic. Simultaneously, everything is true, and nothing is true. We are at a cultural turning point. Our relationship with images and the idea of images as truth have fundamentally changed.”

– Phil Toledano

 

 

Phil Toledano uses AI to make new histories, challenging our belief in what we see and making us question our ideas and how life could turn out. Presented as street photographs and visual documentary,  Toledano recasts the past with cutting-edge technology into collage-like realistic-looking dystopian visuals that tell new stories. At a time when conspiracies are rife and disinformation and lies spread around the world at the flick of a button. Toledano uses wit and alternative realities to challenge our viewsAI.

As he says:

“I thought it would be interesting to use AI to create an entire alternate history of America in a sort of sociological way – and accompany that with stories that make it seem real. And that’s when I started this new project, Another America.”

 

 

“I wanted to set it in the 1940s and 50s, because that was the last time when photographs seemed true. Then it was veracity, right? You look at a photograph from the 40s or 50s – and because you’ve seen that kind of imagery before – you are already primed to assume it’s true. So that’s why the project is set in that era. And the images range from things that clearly are not real to things that could be real, to things that seem real. I want to span that whole spectrum.

“The other thing I guess that’s important about the project is that in the context of history, we’ve had imagery like this for about a 100 years of photography. And, during that time, it became accepted as the truth. But now we’re at the end of that.”

– Phil Toledano

Captions are by John Kenney.

 

 

Easter Sunday 1946

The calls started coming in to telephone operators and police stations around 6:30 in the morning. (This was before 9-1-1 had started). Confused and frightened voices. What was that noise, that explosion, that rumbling? The ten-story Sittenfeld Building had disappeared into a pit some said was over 100 feet deep. The official cause was a sink hole caused by groundwater from the Ohio River.

It would be 55 years until, under the Freedom of Information act, the Cincinnati Enquirer was allowed to review Department of Defense finding of what actually happened. Apparently the FBI had been watching Floyd Bauer, a physicist, inventor, and local eccentric who had worked briefly on the Manhattan Project. He claimed he was experimenting with a nuclear-powered automobile. Through contacts in the Soviet Union, he had managed to get his hands on a minute quantity of Uranium. The Office of the O.S.S. and the feds were preparing to arrest Bauer, but then the explosion happened. The site is now home to a Planet Fitness with a Cheesecake Factory on the ground floor.

Image: © Phillip Toledano / Words: © John Kenney

 

 

“AI is easy, but you still need to have an idea, and the idea still needs to be good. You have to start with that. The funny thing about AI I’ve realized is that, in some ways, you have to think about it more consciously than you do when you’re making a photograph. For instance, if I’m making a picture with AI, I have to think about who’s in the picture. What do they look like? What are their expressions? What ethnicity are they? What’s the weather like? What’s the vantage point of the camera? What lens am I thinking about using? Is it black and white? Is the color correct for this particular era?”

– Phil Toeldano

 

 

 

 

Via: Lens Culture, Institute Artist

You can see more on Phil’s work on his website and his Insta page.