Bruce Eesly’s New Farmer borrows the appearance of a 1960s agribusiness pamphlet to tell a deliberately unreliable story about the Green Revolution. New crop varieties promise bigger harvests; images of agricultural progress invite belief in a triumphant history. As the sequence develops, that promise becomes increasingly implausible, culminating in enormous vegetables. These are AI-generated images, not documentary photographs recovered from a company archive. The narrative is fictional too, although it draws on the language and ambitions of actual agricultural modernisation. The organiser dates the project to 2023; the artist’s shop identifies this self-published first edition as 2024.
Eesly’s contribution lies in connecting the question of synthetic imagery to an older problem: how pictures persuade us to accept a particular account of history. Rather than presenting invented images in isolation, he places them inside a recognisable promotional format. The discrepancy between that apparently practical document and its increasingly fantastic contents provides the work’s critical tension. Its humour invites a second look at the assumptions behind abundant harvests and technological improvement, and at the extractive relationship with nature that such promises can obscure.
The book turns that argument into a small, inexpensive-looking printed object. Measuring 148 by 210 millimetres, the saddle-stitched softcover contains forty pages, one insert and forty-three colour images. The artist’s gallery shows the green cover, interior spreads and the inserted sheet, allowing the pamphlet format to be read as part of the work rather than simply its packaging. The movement from apparent evidence to absurdity depends on encountering images in sequence, not only on recognising individual visual fabrications.
For collectors interested in the changing boundaries of the photobook, New Farmer offers a concrete example of an artist using synthetic images to question documentary authority. The first edition comprises 1,600 copies and was printed in Germany. The project was one of five Dummy Award winners in the 2024 competition. Its collecting interest rests in the relationship between image, fiction and publication form; the award should be understood as recognition of the submitted dummy, distinct from the verified edition catalogued here.
