Then Bendiksen wondered if advances he’d read about in synthetic imagery could fake the fake news makers well enough to fool his peers. Its fake news industry had been gutted by tech company purges, so finding people to photograph could be difficult. Searching online, he discovered the city had associations that could add conceptual dressing: A Slavic god of trickery named Veles features in an archaeological text called The Book of Veles, now believed to be a 20th-century forgery. Visiting Veles, a once communist city like those he had photographed before, could provide a way to offer his own perspective on fake news. “I imagine any minute now Jonas will reveal that the people in the images are computer generated as a 'clever' 'take' on fake news,” Chesterton tweeted-words Bendiksen read with a surge of relief.īendiksen, like many people, felt the 2016 election had revealed some uncomfortable truths about facts in the digital age. Then Chesterton noticed that one of Miskin’s Twitter followers was wearing the same unusual pink sweater as a woman pictured in front of a snack kiosk in The Book of Veles. An hour later, UK filmmaker Benjamin Chesterton, a frequent critic of the photography industry, retweeted the allegations. She claimed to be from Veles and declared “the whole project is a joke” because he had paid locals $50 to pose for his photos. Two weeks later, a Twitter account bearing the name Chloe Miskin tagged Bendiksen in a tweet accusing him of fraud.
As his peers gazed at his work, Bendiksen watched from the bleachers with increasing discomfort. They came from The Book of Veles by Jonas Bendiksen, an award-winning documentary photographer who had traveled to North Macedonia, which had been home to a vibrant fake news industry during the 2016 US election. That night, the outdoor screen shimmered with images of people using laptops in Soviet-era apartments and a bear strolling past rundown industrial sites. The photographic elite gathered in Perpignan, France, on September 1 at the annual Visa Pour L’Image photojournalism festival.
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