“Another America”: The Fictional History of United States by Phillip Toledano
In his project ‘Another America’, artist and photographer Phillip Toledano uses artificial intelligence to construct a fictional, yet hauntingly familiar, history of the United States.
The series is comprised of AI-generated images that mimic the visual style of 1940s and 1950s photography. Toledano specifically chose this era because it was a time when photography was widely perceived as an undeniable record of the truth, creating a powerful tension between the medium’s historical authority and the fabricated content of the images.
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The images are both recognizable and strange, depicting scenes of mid-century American life infused with surreal, impossible elements that challenge the viewer’s perception of reality. Toledano refers to this method as “historical surrealism,” using AI to convincingly rewrite the past with unsettling distortions. The project serves as a sharp commentary on our contemporary “post-truth” world, where facts have become subjective and conspiracy theories can flourish.
As Toledano himself explains, the arrival of AI means that every lie can now be furnished with convincing visual proof, leading to a state where “everything is true, and nothing is true at the same time”. The collection of images, accompanied by short stories from New Yorker writer John Kenney, was published as a book in 2024, cementing Another America as a critical examination of how technology is reshaping our understanding of history and reality.
