I took this photo without much ceremony. No people, no action — just buildings, angles, colour, and light doing what they do at the end of the day. A red wall catching the last warmth of dusk. Neon strips cutting through concrete. Windows glowing softly as if something interesting is happening just out of sight.
It’s the kind of photograph I’m drawn to instinctively. Urban geometry. Slightly awkward compositions. Places that feel transitional — not destinations, but pauses. You can walk past scenes like this a hundred times without noticing them, yet when you stop, they feel oddly cinematic.
There’s something about modern architecture and artificial light that already feels animated. Sharp lines. Bold colours. Almost exaggerated contrast. Even before any editing, this image felt like it belonged in another medium — something between reality and illustration.
That’s when I decided to experiment.
Turning a photograph into a memory
I asked ChatGPT to transform this image into an early-1990s teenage cartoon scene.
Not a generic “cartoon filter,” but something specific — the kind of aesthetic you’d recognise instantly if you grew up in that era. Thick black outlines. Saturated colours. Soft grain. Twilight skies painted in purples and oranges. That sense of optimism and attitude that lived somewhere between after-school TV and Saturday mornings.
What came back genuinely surprised me.
The buildings were still recognisably the same, but they’d been simplified and stylised — as if an animator had traced over reality with intention. The neon lights felt louder. The sky felt warmer. The whole scene took on a sense of narrative, like it was about to cut to a group of characters walking into frame.
So I pushed it further.
Adding characters — and suddenly, a story
The next step was creating characters to live inside the scene.
Four teenagers appeared, standing casually in the alley, full of personality and confidence. Each one distinct. Each one believable. They didn’t feel randomly dropped in — they felt like they belonged there, like the city was theirs.
That’s when the image stopped being a photograph and started becoming a memory.
Because this wasn’t just about nostalgia for a visual style. It was nostalgia for how the world felt back then. Cities felt exciting. Technology felt new, not exhausting. Hanging out meant being present, not documented. Stories unfolded slowly, not in scrollable fragments.
What ChatGPT enabled here wasn’t just an illustration — it was reinterpretation. The AI didn’t replace the original image. It translated it. It took a real place, seen through my lens, and filtered it through a collective cultural memory.
Why this matters (to me, at least)
I’ve always believed photography isn’t just about recording reality. It’s about how reality feels to the person holding the camera. This experiment reinforced that idea in a completely unexpected way.
AI didn’t make the image meaningful. The meaning was already there — in the light, the framing, the mood. What AI did was help explore a different emotional reading of the same scene.
The original photo is quiet.
The cartoon version is loud.
Both are honest.
And that’s what excites me most about tools like ChatGPT — not as replacements for creativity, but as collaborators. They allow you to ask, “What else could this be?” and then actually see the answer.
Sometimes, a city corner is just a city corner.
Sometimes, it’s a 1990s cartoon waiting to happen.
