Areca
Roe

Stock Pile

Stock photography has held a fascination for me for some time, with its generic ubiquity and bland cheeriness. The images are meant to be both calculatedly specific and multi-use, so they can be sold many times over. It's big business, and it's everywhere.

Stock imagery sites put out briefs or prompts predicting to photographers/videographers what is going to be in demand in the coming next month or year. Out of curiosity I began perusing the prompts, and realized they synthesized certain trends in our culture and aspects of this unusual time.


In responding to the prompts, I took quick and strange images and videos at home or close by, using what I had on hand, using myself and my family as models. I took instructions from the briefs—but in a way that misunderstood the text or took it a bit too far, or too literally. In many of the images I heightened the absurdity of the text, or pulled out some fascinating aspect or phrase that deserved further reflection.

The prompts seemed frivolous during the events of the past few years (i.e. a global pandemic), but still managed to capture the zeitgeist. Occasionally they made me laugh, and I found myself wanting the make work about those in particular.