AI has recently boomed in popularity following the release of the OpenAI chat model ChatGPT. It’s opened a lot of conversation about the future of art and photography in the sense that it can be further manipulated and that images can be created without actually going outside, looking for an area, or even using a camera.

Some photographers are exploring this new method of creating imagery through concepts of nostalgia, such as local Jersey photographer Will Lakeman, who uses AI models such as Midjourney and the new generative fill addition to Photoshop to recreate things from his past – not as they were, but how he remembers them from his childhood.

Lakeman mainly focuses on Fort Regent, compiling hundreds of photographs of different areas of the Fort together and then manipulating them with AI to add in things that are no longer there, or to create entirely new objects. Either way, it makes for a striking composition that captures the concept of a distorted, distant memory; a fragment of the past.