We Are at War

Phillip Toledano explores how AI reshapes our perception of truth, using imagined photos from D-Day to show how convincingly history can be rewritten. "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 the image, and the idea of image as truth -has fundamentally changed. What better way to illustrate this than by convincingly reinventing one of the most significant moments of our own near 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 who 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-a 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, imagine what we can do with the present." - Phillip Toledano