Aaron Huey is a photographer with over two decades of experience covering topics ranging from cultural heritage to conflict and the climate crisis. As a photographer for National Geographic, he has photographed over 30 feature stories. His work has also graced the pages of prominent publications such as The New Yorker, TIME, The New York Times, and Smithsonian, among others. In 20 years of assignments, many have focused on the causes and effects of the climate crisis—from Hurricane Katrina to the Southern California wildfires, the Bakken oil field boom in North Dakota to the tar sands of Canada, and the global retreat of glaciers.
GASOLINE GARDENS, a series of AI images, starts with Huey's image archive as the primary prompt, adding only a single text element for each piece (strictly limited to one historical wallpaper pattern name, such as damask, chinoiserie, or toile de jouy). Huey then employs a method that prioritizes visual content over verbal descriptions of the crisis. This approach allows the generative AI to engage more directly with the visual language of the original photography. The resulting wallpaper patterns, capable of an infinite and seamless tiling, emerge as a synthesis of documented moments and AI interpretation that is intrinsically tied to the original photographic evidence while evolving the output into a new aesthetic and distribution channel.
The integration of climate change imagery into domestic and public environments, from boardrooms to bedrooms, creates a persistent, if veiled, reminder of our environmental challenges, blurring the lines between aesthetic appreciation and ecological awareness.
