Michael Mandiberg

Print / video details noted in each individual artwork. Each work has one Artist Proof associated with it, recorded as a separate but related series on Verse.

Michael Mandiberg has collected and analyzed 130 million stock photographs to create Taking Stock, a series of photographs and videos that surface the ideologies haunting these ubiquitous images.

Stock photos need to be more carefully considered because AI is learning from them. These generic photos saturate our visual landscape – instructing us through public service announcements, cajoling us to buy buy buy, and always attempting to pretend that gender is a stable binary. Unlike the way countless artists and scholars have dissected the influence of cinematic, fashion, advertising, and celebrity images, no decent photo theorist or historian will go anywhere near these photos. They smell too strongly of commerce and clichés. All studium, no punctum. This alone makes them worth considering, and now AI is analyzing these stock photographs as if they are factual evidence of what we look like – yet these images are far from neutral.