One of our qualities is that we enthusiastically embark on exciting adventures, but when the going gets tough, we leave everything unfinished. This is one of those cases. When OpenAI introduced the outpainting feature in DALL-E, we decided to create one of those classic metalinguistic works that Northern European authors excel at, choosing one of the most famous photobooks of the 20th century as our starting point: The Americans by Robert Frank.
In 2012, Mishka Henner had already appropriated this work by playing with its original title, erasing parts of the subjects in the photographs, and publishing Less Americains. Now, with DALL-E’s outpainting, we thought of combining Frank and Henner to create More Americans. After all, one of the characteristics that made Frank’s style famous was his framing, and one of the questions we often asked ourselves looking at his pictures was: what lies beyond the frame? Now let’s find out.