Norwegian photographer Jonas Bendiksen’s longstanding preoccupation with the relationship between image, truth and meaning – evident in his earlier works Satellites (2006), The Places We Live (2008) and The Last Testament (2017) – was further roused by the maelstrom of media manipulation surrounding Donald Trump’s election in 2016. The result is The Book of Veles (2021), an ostensibly journalistic investigation into the North Macedonian city Veles, which had become a hub for the manufacturing of fake news, and which shares its name with a 20th-century hoax. With its computer-manipulated images of AI-generated figures in familiarly grim Eastern European cityscapes, the book stages an inquiry into the production, dissemination and reception of misinformation, highlighting the problem encoded into the act of viewing: that often we see what we are expecting to find.

Interview by Thomas RouechéPortrait by Anna Hødnebø

Thomas Roueché Have you always been a photographer?
Jonas Bendiksen Since I was 19. I’ve done this my entire adult life. I don’t put myself into too many boxes, but I’ve done a lot of photojournalism. I originally worked as a classical magazine photographer; that’s how I used to make my living. I still do those assignments, but the first half of my career was very much in that world, National Geographic assignments and so on. I guess I’ve always seen myself as a storyteller, a visual storyteller. Photography has always been the tool or the mechanism through which I can ask questions about the world out there. I can explore the things that I’m curious about, and I’ve always used photography as the vehicle for getting hands dirty in the material out there and the stories that I find fascinating. My last big body of work, The Last Testament, was about seven men who all claimed to be the second coming of Christ. It’s Biblical in form and it also deals with questions of truth from the perspective of delusion, illusion, mythology. It’s not actually that far from what we’re dealing with in Veles, although it’s different. I am aware that some people say, here is this photographer who has been a hardcore photojournalist all his life and suddenly he’s pulling this trick on us all. But in a way, my work has always been a little bit more complicated than that; it has always had this ambiguous streak, even in my first book, Satellites, which came out in 2006. While it is a journey through parts of the former Soviet Union, it’s also ambiguous, very personal; it plays with truth and storytelling. Every time I start a project it starts with the story, and the Veles story was also an interesting story. I would never have done this project if it was just about demonstrating what this technology can do. This project came about because this is a really interesting case. The fake-news production in Veles, all these historical layers of information and misinformation and the ancient Book of Veles, that was a forgery, and then the god Veles. That to me made an interesting story, so it was a good arena to conduct this experiment. 

TR Had you worked using synthetic image-making before?
JB I’d never done anything like this before; I learned everything I know about this through YouTube tutorials. The whole thing is like total amateur hour. This is stuff that the big Hollywood studios have been able to do very well for a long time, and they would do it 100 times better than me. In a way, the question I was posing myself was, are these tools, these synthetic-imaging techniques so good and so simple to use that anyone can basically learn how to do this stuff? It’s not that hard, and you can maybe not do it perfectly, but you can do it well enough that people will start getting fooled. And that’s why I wanted to do everything myself. I didn’t hire people to do these things for me; it was me going on YouTube, checking out the tutorials. My projects have always taken different forms based on what I’m trying to explore. Back in 2008 I did a whole project that was an early foray into 3D or 360-degree photography. I made a book about that, way before people could do these things with their iPhones, and I’ve done projects just using slow-motion video. But I never do these things just for the sake of it, but because they make sense in a particular story. And then in this particular story it made sense, because it is about misinformation; it’s about synthetic information, so I had to use those means of production.

TR Veles was, of course, one of the centres for fake-news production in 2016, but how did you come to it specifically?
JB It started with the beginning of the Trump era. I was kind of confused, perplexed, pissed off and curious about what would happen to information in general. It seemed to me like we were suddenly in a different information landscape. We saw these interventions, with the elections and the Russian troll farms and so on. As I was reading about the role of social-media platforms and the role of Russian intervention, I came across the story of what happened in Veles and was fascinated by it. It is a part of the world I’m interested in, and the story of these totally apolitical guys in faraway North Macedonia who sort of by chance found a way to hack into information systems said so much about how fragmented and at the same time interconnected these information systems are, and how easily they can be hacked. These guys’ work could potentially have big consequences in mighty Washington. At the same time that the story of Veles came to light we also started to see these first prototypes of synthetic images making their way into the mainstream, the deepfake videos or these first artificial-intelligence portraits. I’ve been a photographer for 23 years and I look at pictures every single day, but even I was starting to have a hard time decoding what was real, what was not. That’s when I started asking myself the question, is this stuff getting simple enough to use, that one averagely nerdy photographer like me could just bash out, fix whole documentaries from his basement? After a short time I realised, I’m not going to like the answer to this question. This is quite scary. The more I played with these techniques, the more I watched my own little Frankenstein’s monster come to life. I quickly got the impression that once these things come to life, they’re unstoppable in a way. It’s going to be very hard to control this thing we are creating. I was fascinated by the story of what had happened in Veles, but of course, that story was over by then. After Obama mentioned them in a speech, Facebook and Twitter turned down the algorithm, so they went out of business. That meant the only way to go back in time and see these fake news producers in action was to recreate them. Then I discovered the historical layers, which added interest; I like projects when they start layering up. When we got into the god of Veles and the city of Veles – and obviously these things actually don’t have anything to do with one another, the town is not named after the god as far as I could tell, it is a pure coincidence that these things share a name – it felt like it was aligning in a way that was irresistible. The god Veles in Slavic mythology was this sneaky guy, like the god of chaos, of deception, magic and wild animals. He would be so happy to see all this deception being done in his name. So it just gave me that extra layer to explore. 

TR This mystical element is interesting because it seems to me that your work is saying something about belief in the context of information and our perception of reality.
JB I didn’t know how this was going to go. My plan was to create the book, put it out there, share the material on social-media channels. My expectation was that within a very short time, people would begin asking questions about the material. Have you seen this book? Isn’t it a little bit over the top? What’s going on here? Why are the bears walking around all over Veles? The synthetic text in the book is over the top; everything is over the top. I expected people to start getting suspicious, but not quite able to put their finger on what exactly was wrong because there are so many layers of wrong in the project. I would then involve myself in that debate in sort of vague ways, and then it would be revealed. That was the original plan. What I wasn’t prepared for was the extent to which we see what we want to see. When we look at things, we believe the things we want to believe and that’s where it connects with The Last Testament project. If you want to believe the ancient Book of Veles is a real historical document, like very many people do, then you believe it. You see these pictures of mafia-like fake-news producers in Veles walking all over town, alongside the brown bears. If that’s your idea of what this story is supposed to be like, you know, it’s Eastern Europe, fake news, this is the way it’s supposed to look. That’s what that was playing up to. The book is also, in a way, a parody of what I do. It’s a parody of photojournalism, of documentary photography. I am creating the same clichés and stereotypes that I myself probably would photograph if I went there to do this story normally. The Soviet, Communist-era apartment blocks, all looking a little bit grim, a bit gritty. I myself am a sucker for these clichés; so is everyone else. We see the things we want to see and we believe the things we want to believe, and I think that is one of the frightening things out there in the world right now in the sense of fragmentation of the information landscape. The New York Times can debunk this or that conspiracy theory as much as they want, but for the people who have decided to believe it, it’s just a bunch of liberal fake news from the New York Times as usual. We find the guys to give us credible information for whatever thing we have decided to believe. There are such huge quantities of junk information out there that we have a sorting problem. 

TR How did the project make you think about the visual language or tropes of photojournalism?
JB There will be a before and after Veles era in my own trajectory. I was walking around trying to recreate cliché Jonas Bendiksen pictures. At times honestly I was disgusted with myself: “Oh man, is it that easy to make one of your pictures? Come on, did you really fall for that? Would you really wait around the whole day to get that picture?” Once you’ve gone into the inner wiring of your own work like that, your own habits and your own box of tricks, it’s very hard to go back to doing exactly the same things as before. I don’t know what my next project will be like, but I have a feeling that it somehow might well be a little different to what has come before, because I’ve looked into my own brain, somehow. I looked into the wiring of it all and I see it a little more, a little differently now. That was a strange experience. On a personal level, it was an emotional time because I became a photographer through my first book, Satellites, created over a seven-year period all along the southern borderlands of the former Soviet Union, and Veles itself looks a lot like many of the towns I spent time in back then. In a way, visually, I was walking around recreating old Satellites pictures. The same impulses were there. It brought me back to the beginning of my career; it was like, this is where I started in my work and I’m trying to recreate everything that was between these bookends of then and now. I was filled with nostalgia, as well as with this wish to break it all down and destroy everything. It was emotional for me somehow to walk around there doing this. ◉