We Are At War
© Phillip ToledanoThe 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.
What better way to illustrate this than convincingly reinventing one of the most significant moments in our recent history?
June 6th, 1944. D day.
Amongst the thousands of soldiers landing that day were photographers. To name a few: The Army Film and Photographic Unit, covering the landings at Sword, Juno and Gold beaches. Richard Taylor, a sergeant in the US Signal Corps filmed the assault. And at Omaha Beach, the photographer Robert Capa.
Capa shot approximately 4 rolls of film and sent them to London to be developed, but due to a lab mishap, only 11 images survived.
Capa created an empty pocket of history pocket that can be filled with AI - what images might have been on those lost rolls of film?
“We Are At War is part of my continued exploration of historical surrealism - working with AI, I imagine one of Capa’s lost roll of 36 images - and in doing so, demonstrate how utterly convincing invented history can be. If we can rewrite the past so persuasively, imagine what we can do with the present and even the future.”
click the link to view all the images in the set
The work will be shown at Planches Contactes photo festival, in October (21st - Jan 7th 2025)
We Are At War will be published in October of 2024, by L’Artiere.
The monograph will not be be a conventional book, but rather Toledano aims to continue the idea of historcial surrealism by creating a lost invented artifact from the 1940’s. The images will be printed in a newspaper extra from 1944, complete with an AI generated article, and AI generated advertising, that will come in a period correct box, accompanied by the contact sheet. It will be a limited edition of 750 boxes.
