Walker show gives stock images their day in the gallery

From the ATM display to the gas pump to the circulars in our mailboxes, we are awash in images. Yet few of us understand how many of the pictures and videos we see are stock images — generic pictures designed to be sold for use in advertising, publishing and a host of other media forms.

A new show called "Ordinary Pictures," opening this weekend at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, explores the power and value of those images.

In a gallery at the Walker, a video montage loops silently on one wall. It shows a series of attractive people each working on a project. One is painting a picture, another glazing a pot. After a few moments each person looks up at the viewer.

It's engaging. You get the sense they are selling something — but what? It could be further education classes or cold remedies. Or maybe one of those products with a warning about consulting a doctor if the effects last too long. It becomes kind of creepy.

"Ordinary Pictures" curator Eric Crosby said the montage was created by an artist using a popular stock-image site.

"And he found those images simply by typing in the phrase 'artist looking at camera,'" he said.

Crosby said stock images are designed to be sold and used as part of something else.

"They are exceedingly generic pictures that are created by photographers and licensed and sold by corporations to editors, to designers, to curators, for any imaginable use," said Crosby.

Crosby described stock images as an invisible aspect of our visual culture. But they are everywhere. Relatively few academic studies have addressed stock images and their use, but Crosby said one media scholar in the United Kingdom attempted to get a handle on the size of the market.

"He was able to estimate some years ago that about 70 percent of commercial images in use could be qualified as stock images," he said.

Although numbers are hard to nail down, industry experts estimate the stock image business is worth billions every year. Crosby said stock images have fascinated artists since the 1960s.This show features their work.

In 1982, artist Louise Lawler went to a pet store and photographed a parrot in front of a red background, which allows for easy editing. Crosby said the image is interesting not for what it shows, but what it says about photography.

"The parrot itself is nature's perfect copycat, right?" he said. "It can mimic the human voice. And so what the artist seems to be saying with this picture is that photography can be an art of mimicry more than documentation."

Many of the pictures explore the difference between real meaning and meaning that is imposed. There are examples of image appropriation, including work by Richard Prince, who became famous — and infamous — for creating new works by photographing advertisements.

Filmmaker Steve McQueen, director of the Oscar-winning "12 Years a Slave," is represented by a piece he made using what's known as the Golden Record. It was a collection of generic images of human culture selected by author and broadcaster Carl Sagan. It went into space on the Voyageur probes launched in 1977, in case they encountered intelligent life. McQueen set the images against a soundtrack of people speaking in tongues. Crosby said it creates a mindset useful for the entire show.

"One way to look at these images is to take on a kind of alien perspective," Crosby said. "To imagine yourself as outside of the culture that produced them."

Crosby said he believes all of the artists in "Ordinary Pictures" are interested in shedding light on the way images are created and distributed.

"We don't like to think about that too much," he said. "There's a lot of money changing hands in that, there's a lot of power implied in that. So any consideration of that by the audience of this show I think would be great."

And perhaps bring a little more understanding of those pictures used at the mall, on TV and on computer pop-up ads.