Reimagining history: Phillip Toledano uses AI to recreate Robert Capa's lost D-Day photos

euronews (in English)

In his latest project, Phillip Toledano uses AI to reimagine Robert Capa's lost D-Day images, challenging our understanding of truth and memory in an age where reality can be reshaped.

Transcript

00:00Because AI now exists, everything is true and nothing is true.

00:07Our relationship with the image has fundamentally changed.

00:10And we're moving, I think we're at a really critical point of, like, what's real anymore?

00:15We don't really know.

00:28In 1944, a very famous photographer, Robert Capa, stepped off the boats in Normandy, on Omaha Beach,

00:35and he shot, the story goes, four rolls of film, sent the film back to England,

00:39where some poor hapless lab assistant messed up the developing,

00:43and only 11 images of his D-Day landing shot survived.

00:46So he created this empty pocket of history, which I thought I could fill with AI.

00:52So I've recreated or reimagined a lost roll of Robert Capa's film from D-Day.

00:58But the point really is not so much about D-Day and Robert Capa, it's really about,

01:03if I can so convincingly reinvent and recreate the past, just imagine what I can do with the present.

01:14The thing I always say about AI, it's like working with a really talented but really drunk person.

01:18It still makes mistakes, so you have to check for, you know,

01:21make sure the faces look right, you have to make sure things feel right.

01:25One of the things that people always have a go at me for, for AI, and they say,

01:28well, you're just, you know, sitting at a screen and typing in words, which is absolutely true,

01:32but so are journalists, so do writers, that's what they do.

01:36So AI, for me, is more akin in some ways to writing than, or to movie making, than it is to photography.

01:42It just happens to look like photography, but the creative process is completely different.

01:55This is what I would like to have happen, is people walk through the exhibition,

01:59not knowing it's AI, and they find the images powerful, they find them moving, they find them human.

02:05And then, at the end, they realize they've been fooled.

02:09And to me, this is going to mirror our experience on a regular basis with imagery.

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