Photographic artist Phillip Toledano is used to being a pariah. “I’ve been on the receiving end of a two-year-long internet bludgeoning,” he tells Life & Leisure from his New York apartment. This is because, after spending most of his two-decade career as a traditional photographer, he’s put down his camera to become a trailblazer in AI-generated art, conjuring worlds as surreal as they are uncanny.

His watershed collection Another America (2023) – which was exhibited last year at the Planches Contact photography festival in Deauville, France and the AI Biennale in Essen, Germany – explores a mid-century inspired cityscape populated by women with their hair ablaze, Zeppelins menacingly floating between skyscrapers, and wolves stalking the sidewalks. A companion series, Another England, is set to be published later this year.