The Art of the Lie: Phillip Toledano on AI, Deceit, and Why Photography Was Never Really True
I want to come clean about something. When I first heard about Phillip Toledano's show at Fotografiska Berlin, my instinct was eye-roll, followed by mild irritation. An artist using AI to generate photographs and calling it a show? Presenting them as his dead father's found negatives? I thought I knew exactly what I was walking into.
I was wrong.
Phillip Toledano has been making work that taps at the edges of human experience for decades - grief, parenthood, mortality, plastic surgery, phone sex workers, bankrupt offices. He is, in the truest sense of the phrase, a conceptual artist (he hates saying that and braces himself for the egg-throwing every time). And what he has done with AI is not what most artists are doing with AI. This is not slop. This is not someone who discovered Midjourney last year and started calling themselves a photographer. This is someone who has been making photographs for forty years, who understands the nature of an image at a cellular level, who has decided to use this new and terrifying tool in the service of ideas that actually matter.
Watch our interview with Phillip in it’s entirety.
Meet Edward Trevor - Phillip Toledano's Most Audacious Fiction Yet
The project in question is called Edward Trevor: Never Seen the Light. It's named after Phillip’s father - specifically, his father's stage name from his acting days. The show presents a series of stunning street photographs, presented as though they were taken in 1930s and 40s New York, discovered as a box of undeveloped negatives amongst his late father's belongings. They hang on the walls of Fotografiska Berlin under the banner of a photographer called Edward Trevor. They are gorgeous. They are historically credible. They are completely fabricated.
This is the expanded bubble of deceit that Phillip has been building toward. He started with reinvented histories - a lost roll of Robert Capa's film from D-Day, an alternate 1980s England, a reimagined 1940s New York where humans and animals exist as equals. In each case, there was always a clear gap between the artist and the work. You knew Phillip made it. With Edward Trevor, he has collapsed that gap entirely, folded himself into the lie, and in doing so made his most provocative point yet: we are nowhere near as good at detecting deceit as we think we are.
There is a single image in the show where he has pushed the fabrication further than the others - a pair of conjoined figures, something slightly off about their physicality. He asked visitors what they saw. Nobody noticed. Not one person. If you, like me, have spent time looking at this period of photography, you might catch a slightly over-exaggerated sinewy neck here, a slightly too-perfect composition there. But Phillip's point is not aimed at us. It's aimed at the overwhelming majority of people who consume images the way he describes Instagram: "like driving a car past billboards, rolling down the window, shaking your fist at the billboard and driving onto the next one." They're not looking. They're reacting.
Why AI Is the Only Tool That Can Talk About the Death of Truth
And this is where the work becomes urgent, beyond the art world debate about whether AI images count. We are living through a moment when history is being actively reinvented - he says this with great care, pointing to the now-infamous AI-generated video of Gaza reimagined as a luxury seaside resort. The instrument of that deception is the same instrument Phillip is using. His argument is that to talk about the death of truth, he must use the very tool that is killing it. He couldn't make this work with AI.
The Unseen Thread: Loss, Grief, and a Body of Work That Knows More Than Its Maker
What I find most striking, having done the deep dive into his back catalogue, is the through-line of loss. His first book, Bankrupt, photographed the detritus of offices abandoned during the dot-com collapse - objects left behind, the archaeology of a sudden ending. He later realised this echoed the experience of losing his sister when he was six, the way her belongings remained in the house after she was gone. His book Days of My Father is one of the most tender, painful, honest records of watching a parent age that I have encountered. A New Kind of Beauty examined plastic surgery - which he and a Hamburg curator realised, retrospectively, was the same work as Days of My Father, both about the human refusal to accept death. And Reluctant Father documented, with almost uncomfortable honesty, the terror and bewilderment of becoming a parent - a project his daughter (who was born three months after his own father died, into the worst possible timing for a man already unmoored) is now writing a rebuttal to. Which, I will say, I am entirely here for.
Edward Trevor sits in this lineage. It is not separate from his personal work. It is an extension of it - his father's name, his father's spirit, his father's surrealist sensibility informing the images he made. He told me that while he was generating these photographs, he was thinking about what his father might have found interesting to see. There is something unbearably moving about that. A son inventing images his dead father might have taken. A son giving his father an artistic legacy that extends further than reality allowed.
Does a Fabricated Photograph Lose Its Power When You Know the Truth?
When I asked Phillip whether the AI images lose their power once you know they're fabricated - whether the magic of street photography, the sense that someone saw that moment happen, evaporates when you realise no one saw it - he turned the question back beautifully. When you look at a painting, you don't mourn the fact that it didn't happen. You're moved because something came from inside someone's head. These images came from inside Philip's head. Why should they be less?
I don't have a clean answer to that. I sat with the images for a while and I'll be honest with you: there are two or three of them I'd want to live with. And my relationship with them would change over time, the way it does with any photograph I love. That's not nothing.
Phillip thinks AI is at its daguerreotype stage - “we are the person with the cloak over their head and the magnesium flash, still figuring out what we're even doing stage.” And he's probably right that in a few years, the outrage will have moved on to something else. But what will remain, I think, is the work of the artists who were paying attention to the right questions at the right moment. Who were curious enough to open every window and look. This show is one of those works.
Go to his website. Follow him on Instagram. Look at everything. And send us an email if you’d like a list of work in the show.