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Images both are and aren't generic, even the most bland are still specific singular instances of a larger regime of similar images, like stock photography's multi-cultural workplace theme. Images become soft by their ubiquity, their dispersal, a continual re-staging erodes their specific edges to become some semi-solid substance of genericness. And any new instances are based on the patterns of the last one. Iconic photographs are often predicated on a tension of specificity given to a ubiquitous theme, a concerned mother, a puddle jump, a flag raising, each iconic image eventually returning to some blank marker of vague icon. Each remembrance is like an appropriation, a rephotographic theft of its specificity to soften it back to the soup of ubiquity, of theme, of trope, back to stock image.
See too: Sherrie Levine at Simon Lee