In connection with Kunstbok Oslo, Sverres Zine is launching a loose trilogy. The three magazine-books are based on stock photography and royalty-free images, originally intended to illustrate something outside themselves. Here they are instead paired up as diptychs, with the potential to evoke a third image in the reader. Or at least to leave something hanging in the air.

The titles are Hun d, Om syn and Av figur. The first book shows dogs and people, the second shows people in a dreamlike state, and the third shows sculptures looking at one another. The material is sourced from platforms such as Pexels and Unsplash, and was taken by photographers around the world over the past few years.

These royalty-free images are the same kind of material that artificial intelligence is trained on today to learn about the visual world. Stock photos are made to be easy to find and easy to use, with clear subjects, tidy compositions and keywords that state what the image is “about”. That also makes them ideal teaching material for machines: each image teaches the model one thing, what a dog, a dream or a sculpture is supposed to look like. Images made to illustrate something else end up as curriculum. And since such images dominate today’s content production, they largely shape how both machines and humans perceive and interpret the world around them.

The nature of the photobook, where the reader always has two pages in front of them, invites us to see entire spreads as diptychs. Through volume and repetition, the books explore this space. Gaze direction works as glue between the subjects, which at best are released from their original keywords and algorithms. When the gazes cross, the images are allowed to mean something other than what they were made for.