In the 1950s, the cigarette company Brown & Williamson had a revolutionary idea. Since it was considered inelegant for women to blow smoke out of their mouths, why not create a product where smoke could seep neatly out of one’s skin? After a series of experiments, a company chemist found a blend of light Indonesian tobacco that did the trick. All customers needed to do was breathe in and hold the smoke in their lungs, and it would waft out the back of their heads “like a summer breeze.”
Did Brown & Williamson’s Polite Extra Slims ever exist? No. While the idea of smoke blowing out of women’s skulls sounds wildly implausible, the tale is so elaborate it almost seems that it could have happened.
The photographer Phillip Toledano imagined this scenario and others for Another America, a new book that depicts strange phenomena in a fictional 1940s and 1950s—a time when people never questioned the images that came from cameras. Toledano tells these stories using A.I.-generated photographs, accompanied by text from John Kenney, a writer for The New Yorker.
Toledano is fairly new to A.I. He has been a photographer since the early 2000s, but his experiments with Midjourney, a photo-creation program, only began last year. When he shared his first batch of experiments on Instagram, it was a revelation. But he soon realized that crafting these images meant grasping the art of writing effective prompts. “You have to start with an idea, and then create a spell to conjure that idea into reality,” Toledano told The Art Newspaper last month. “The words count. The order of the words counts. And then you must repeat the spell over and over again until you’re satisfied.”
After mastering the spell, he set about finding an effective way to use it. For the book, Toledano chose scenarios that comment on our new world, where it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between fake news and the truth. And he does so cleverly. What if special “bubble pants”— trousers that spurted soap bubbles as men walked—had been invented in the 1940s? What if, in New Jersey in 1954, the temperature suddenly dropped 40 degrees in minutes, causing only middle-aged bankers to freeze to death? These scenarios defy reason, yet one might imagine them happening if there were actual pictures; for example, a shot of bankers outdoors, standing frozen like tin soldiers.
Although the images are fake, the compositions sometimes resemble the work of photography’s greats—the landscapes of Ansel Adams, the portraits of William Eggleston. “One of the things that people would say about photography, when it first took off in the 1840s and 50s, is that it can never be art because the machine is making the image,” Toledano has explained. “Now, here we are again, saying exactly the same thing.” —Elena Clavarino
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at AIR MAIL