London-born photographer Phillip Toledano has traded his camera for artificial intelligence, using AI technology to create surreal images of England that challenge our perception of photographic truth. His latest book "Another England" features elaborate AI-generated scenes that would have been impossible and prohibitively expensive to create using traditional photography methods.
When Toledano gets an idea, he pursues it with obsessive dedication that borders on concerning. In 2012, following several family deaths, the photographer became fixated on what terrible things life might bring him. He took DNA tests to predict future illnesses, consulted fortune-tellers and tarot readers, then worked with prosthetics experts to transform himself into different versions of his future self - an alcoholic, a white-collar criminal, and a 90-year-old dementia patient. This three-year project called "Maybe" required acting coaches, stylists, photo assistants, and numerous extras, making it extremely expensive and time-consuming to produce.
Now, a decade later, Toledano has published a book focusing on a reimagined past rather than unpalatable futures, collaborating only with the AI-powered image generator Midjourney. The images in "Another England" are far more elaborate than anything he produced during his photography career, yet cost him almost nothing to make and provided a much more enjoyable creative process. However, the response has not been universally positive this time.
"I've been on the receiving end of a fairly sizable amount of anger," Toledano admits with a grin during a video call from New York. "I got a nice message on Instagram that said: 'Fuck you. Fuck your AI. You have no talent.'" His embrace of artificial intelligence for image generation - this marks his third AI-powered publication - provokes anger on multiple fronts. Some dismiss AI art as "soulless AI slop" on aesthetic or humanistic grounds, while others worry about data privacy issues and job displacement.
Most significantly, AI's assault on whatever remains of our trust in photographic veracity is something Toledano deliberately provokes with obvious delight. "Another England" opens with an image of a sheep in a foggy field that appears almost real. The leafless trees look entirely convincing, as does the sheep itself, except the creature hovers 12 feet above the ground. The flock of starlings on the following page seems plausible until we question whether starlings can actually form perfect circles during murmurations.
After this gentle introduction, all pretenses of realism disappear. People in a quiet Gloucestershire town walk around with hydrangeas for heads, supposedly linked to a recent village flower show outbreak. A giant squid wraps itself around a car in a Wolverhampton canal. A 60-foot rendering of Margaret Thatcher's face glares from the white cliffs of Dover. Toledano, who has lived in the United States for 30 years, wanted to create a series about the England of his youth, refracted through a surrealist lens with political overtones.
This version represents the 1980s bleeding into the present day, where a fox liberation army sets fire to Land Rovers and enterprising scarecrows face hatred for stealing jobs from real people. No cameras were used in creating this book - each image originated with a line of text. Toledano might instruct the AI tool: "I want to see a cathedral. I want to see a waterslide going through it. Show me that image. OK, now tweak it this way and that way."
The initial prompt represents just the beginning of a lengthy refinement process that might take days or weeks, which Toledano compares to "working with a very talented but really drunk person." As an artist accustomed to incredible exactitude in his work, he's had to develop what he calls "cerebral elasticity" when working with AI. Sometimes the AI provides ideas slightly adjacent to his vision, requiring flexibility to explore interesting tangents. Other times, he must "bludgeon it a bit," likening the process to "whittling a stick."
He completes all work, including final edits, on his mobile device. "People always think I'm sitting in front of some giant mainframe, but it's just me and my bloody phone," he explains. "It means I can make art anywhere." Part of his motivation for abandoning traditional photography stems from the pure pleasure of transforming wild imaginings into photorealistic images. "It's like being a wizard," he says. "It's like you're half Gandalf when you're working with Midjourney."
Toledano also aims to reflect our current state of cognitive imbalance as trust in image-making crumbles in the deepfake era. "When I started looking into AI three or four years ago, it became passionately obvious that our fundamental relationship with the image was going to change forever," he explains. "This idea we'd had that photographs are truth - and I say that very loosely - was gone. To talk about that idea, I have to use the thing that's killing that idea, which is AI."
When confronted with standard objections to AI use in visual art, beginning with data privacy concerns, Toledano dismisses them briskly. "Early on, people talked a lot about copyright and how everyone's images have been used without permission to train AI models, but I don't hear that so much anymore," he says. "I don't really care, because the technology is so extraordinary, it gives people and artists an opportunity to make incredible things."
Regarding specialists who lose employment when everything gets outsourced to AI - makeup artists, photo assistants, and actors he previously hired for "Maybe" - he acknowledges the concern pragmatically. During a recent talk, someone asked why he couldn't create images like cinematic photographer Gregory Crewdson. "First of all, I do not have the Crewdson budget," Toledano responded. "And even if I did, I couldn't make images with the scope of those in 'Another England' - I couldn't make birds fly in a circle."
Concerning the perceived lack of humanity in AI art, he draws historical parallels: "That's exactly what painters and philosophers said about photography in the 1850s: 'It's a machine taking the image, it will never have feeling.'" He believes most objections will disappear as the technology becomes established. "If you look at photography's history, at every juncture, there's a percentage of enraged natives railing against change. Think about Stephen Shore shooting color photography in the 1970s and outraged photographers saying black and white is the only true art form. Same with digital photography, and Photoshop."
However, some experts question whether Toledano overstates this change's significance. On "Another England's" first page, he writes (with AI chatbot assistance) that AI's existence has made "everything true, and nothing true, simultaneously. Facts are now infinitely elastic." Max Houghton, who runs the master's program in photojournalism and documentary photography at London College of Communication, disputes this claim.
"It's simply incorrect," Houghton states. "Of course it hasn't made everything and nothing true simultaneously. It's not the case that facts are now infinitely elastic. There are still facts." She adds that fakery has been part of photography since its earliest days - trust in the medium wasn't intact until AI arrived. While Houghton sees value in artists using AI to comment on the technology's impact, she feels Toledano's book falls short due to lack of transparency about its process.
"This is work created by text prompts," Houghton explains. "If you're trying to do something creative with AI and question ideas of truth, then I need to see the prompt. I need to see what you asked AI to do. I need to know your parameters as an author." Transparency hasn't characterized Toledano's AI work - his approach to veracity issues tends toward pranksterish rather than scholarly methods.
Last year, he used AI to create the lost photos that Robert Capa allegedly took on Normandy's landing beaches in 1944, filling gaps with images of soldiers en route to D-Day and its bloody aftermath. During a talk at a French exhibition, he presented them as genuine, only afterward revealing they were fakes. His intention was partly to counter the notion that all AI images lack soul. "I wanted to make convincing imagery that had real power and emotion, and if you walked in off the street and saw these, you would feel moved," he explains.
Despite criticism, Toledano doesn't believe anyone can simply churn out striking images of levitating sheep or plausible Capa reproductions. "If you want to make great images with AI, you have to be a really competent photographer," he argues. "You have to understand what makes a good image. You have to understand light and time of day and weather and narrative and structure within the image and composition - all that stuff. You have to be incredibly awake for the process."
Toledano declares his photography days behind him - he's now a full evangelist for AI image-making, regardless of ethical pitfalls. "I just find it a marvel, to be able to roam so freely. If you're an artist, why wouldn't you want to see how that feels? And if it's not for you, that's fine." The only moment he sounds nostalgic for past methods involves recalling the process of creating different futures in "Maybe."
"The greatest part of doing that work was being those versions of myself and seeing how the world saw me," he reflects. "I was 45 at the time, and you go from being 45 to 95 in three or four hours, and you're being rolled around by a nurse in a wheelchair - I realized how invisible I was as a nonagenarian. People didn't see me, and to feel that for a couple of hours was really extraordinary. I never would have felt that if I'd done it with AI."
