The byline for the new art book Another England says it all. “Images and words by Phillip Toledano and AI,” it reads. It’s the AI part that jars – not because Toledano, the London-born, New York-based artist isn’t up front about embracing AI as just the latest tool in his box. But because the results – a series of surrealist, often ironic and always memorable photographs, many accompanied by short, funny texts, also written with AI assistance – aim to draw attention to how we think of imagery in today’s age of AI.

“I intended these images to be satirical, much more so than [the preceding volume, Another America, published last year, which also comprised AI-generated images],” says Toledano. “The whole point of this AI work has been to reference this new experience we’re having with media, in which we’re not quite sure whether what we’re seeing is true or not, whether it’s even possible or not. Of course, a lot of these images show things that are fantastical, but others are just a notch or two away from what could have been.”

So, alongside amusing vignettes – the amateur botanist who aims to replace all of the lightbulbs in her village with photo-luminescent jelly-fish, foxes leading a rebellion against blood sports, or the scarecrows that upset the status quo by demanding to be more useful to the local community – are instances of A-roads running through the middle of Stonehenge, cathedrals converted into water parks, or the Mount Rushmore-like face of Margaret Thatcher carved into the White Cliffs of Dover.

“We’re in a time when it seems that facts are all personal choices now. They’re whatever we decide them to be,” says Toledano. “I think in some years’ time we will look back on this period when history seems infinitely elastic [and be more questioning of it]. I hope so. I’m not sure how we proceed with society if everyone’s version of the facts differs. Right now it seems like more people [deal with it by] just not paying any attention to any of it anymore.”

If such portentousness makes the one-time advertising photographer sound downbeat, Toledano is actually anything but, laughing a lot at this ever-shifting predicament: just a few years ago people assumed the images they saw were genuine reportage (when they weren’t) and already now, he notes, they assume that any images they see of anything odd or unusual must be AI-generated fakes (when they’re not necessarily so). “We’ve gone from believing everything is real to believing everything is unreal,” he chuckles. 

Another England approaches this topic in Toledano’s most lighthearted way to date. Last year, another of his projects, We Are At War, included an exhibition in Normandy showing recovered and restored images – dark, gritty, harrowing – shot by the celebrated war photographer Robert Capa on the D-Day beaches. It was only near the exit that visitors were told that all of the images were generated using AI. “It was,” he explains, “an exercise in just how convincing [photography] could be”.

Toledano concedes that photography has always been manipulated, and that it’s more through culture than in actuality that photography came to be considered an arbiter of the truth. But, he notes, our relationship to the reality presented in photographs has only worsened through our own unthinking image creation. In one of Another England’s tales – they read like short, vaguely dystopian, illustrated stories – the English Tourist Authority feels compelled to deploy fixed inflatables of sheep, horses and trees across the countryside in order to ensure it remains suitably photogenic. 

“Photography strikes me as purely transactional now. It’s fodder, just content – here’s this place, this car, this meal, this watch – and we’re all shovelling coal into some giant furnace,” Toledano chuckles. “It seems to have become a thankless task. Nobody takes a picture because the scene is beautiful, for themselves. They just take it as a means of validating their life. It has become reflexive. I think without social media we’d probably take something like 80 per cent fewer photos than we do”.

Maybe Toledano is trying to say something about himself with the images of Another England too. Arguably they present a somewhat nostalgic view of England – all green fields, village life, country houses, quiet canals, a touch of nimbyism, but also a characteristically English Heath Robinson-style inventiveness. He concedes that his take is double-edged – both as someone who was born and raised in England, but who has led most of his adult life in the US. 

“I think my view of England is both from a distance and from the past,” he says. “There are [behaviours and attitudes] that I think are to be found everywhere – nimbyism, for example – and others that I think are very English and of every age. In many ways Another England is also about England as it used to be and what it’s become, both for good and for worse”.

Right now, with his 16-year-old daughter off to university, Toledano is gently persuading her to consider studying in the UK – if only to give him the excuse to move back. In the meantime, she provides some touchstone of stability: while he mithers about the tectonic shifts the world appears to be facing – geo-political, technological, climate, and not one by one but all at once – she sees it all as so much wallpaper, “much as when I was growing up in the 80s I was kind of oblivious to, for example, the Cold War,” he says. 

All the same, he’s left with a nagging sense of disquiet of a kind that his images in Another England capture so well: sometimes with wit, sometimes with wistfulness and at other times more in warning. “[Some of them are] almost pictures anyone could take but for one detail – some weird thing happening – that creates a sense of unease in the natural order of things,” he says, “as much as I think the natural order of things we knew in the late 20^th century is changing”. 

Take, for example, one of the book’s stand-out pictures, something akin to the inverse of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, in which everyday life goes on utterly oblivious to Icarus’ mythic plunge into the sea. In Toledano’s image it’s dusk. In the foreground stands a solitary cosy country house, lit warmly and invitingly from within. And, passing by in the background – unnoticed by those in the house – is a huge airship on fire. 

“I think in a way that’s how we’re living now – we have this close existence with all the things we love and cherish, and further off everything about the world feels wobbly,” says Toledano. But, honestly, he really is a laugh.

Another England is out now. 

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