In the wake of the 2016 US election, global attention was suddenly drawn to the North Macedonian town of Veles, home to a “pro-Trump fake-news factory”. Combining synthetic imagery and AI-generated text, photographer Jonas Bendiksen not only unearthed the story, but soon became part of it himself.
In the wake of the Russian Revolution, the story goes, a White Russian lieutenant came across a collection of wooden planks in a looted aristocratic mansion in Ukraine. They were inscribed with a form of old Slavic and appeared to be a late antique text of ancient Slavic religion, specifically the god Veles. All trace of the planks was lost during the Second World War, but their text, the so-called Book of Veles, was written in a Slavic suspiciously close to modern Slavic languages. Historical analysis gradually made it clear that the book was a forgery, a fact that has done nothing to assuage its on-going popularity among Slavic nationalists, for whom it represents a powerful vision of their pre-Christian heritage.
During the US election of 2016, global attention was suddenly drawn to the North Macedonian town of Veles, home to a “pro-Trump fake-news factory”, whose name has nothing to do with the Slavic god. A group of teenagers in the town, in search of quick cash, had become unlikely political activists in the grand drama of Trump’s election, running over 100 websites producing pro-Trump news articles. Veles’ cottage industry was rapidly shut down as the big internet platforms tweaked their algorithms, but the idea of a post-Soviet backwater hosting anti-democratic troll farms rapidly entered the popular imaginary.
Photographer Jonas Bendiksen has always had a fascination for the vagaries of what we believe. In his The Last Testament: The Truth Shall Set You Free (2017), he documented seven men who all claim to be the Messiah. Bendiksen was drawn to the real story behind the misinformation, and the forgery with which the city shares its name. That Veles was a trickster god associated with magic and bears only added to the appeal of the story.
Diving into these many layers of trickery, and armed with the digital tools that make the creation of photorealistic images or “deepfakes” ever easier, Bendiksen set out to capture the story of Veles by creating synthetic images of the town from his computer. The series of images he generated speak the language of photojournalism so fluently they seem aggressively real. The subsequent book, which features an AI-generated text and pages from the Book of Veles was released at first without explanation, causing consternation among reviewers and those initially taken in by the satirical misinformation it presents. As one tweet reads: “a so-called piece of journalism… photographer parachutes into my hometown, treats the people in the pictures as if they are nothing… the whole project is a joke.” ◉
All images from Jonas Bendiksen, The Book of Veles, GOST Books, 2021