This Field Note documents an editorial portrait assignment for The Times, featuring Marc Warner, co-founder of AI company Faculty and now global chief technology officer at Accenture.
The portrait was photographed at Italia Uno, a small Italian café on Charlotte Street in central London, a place Warner had frequented since his student days at UCL. The setting was an important part of the assignment, connecting the subject to a familiar place in his personal history while providing an informal setting for a conversation about the future of artificial intelligence.
Rather than placing Warner within a conventional corporate environment, the photographs situate him in the everyday surroundings of the café: Italian football shirts, shelves of food and the activity of the restaurant around him. The contrast between the ordinary setting and the scale of the subject matter gives the portraits their character.
The feature considers both the potential and dangers of increasingly powerful AI, as well as Warner’s own work in AI safety, government and technology. The photographs needed to give a human dimension to a conversation that deals largely in systems, technology and questions of global consequence.
The resulting portraits use place to bring the subject back to a recognisable, human scale. A conversation about the future of artificial intelligence, photographed over an Italian sandwich in a café that has been part of Warner’s life since university.
Read the full story in The Times
