Images to live with


This is a tool to create PDFs with data set images for printing.

To generate a PDF with images to live with, fill the form below with the number of images you want (max 50) and press OK.


The tool automatically picks from a selection of 14436 images randomly chosen from 8 different datasets: ("Tiny ImageNet", "COIL-100", "Labelled Faces in the Wild", "Leaf", "Open Image", "Stanford Dogs", "Tencent", and "VisualGenome").

For more details, read the article "Living with images from large-scale data sets: A critical pedagogy for scaling down", on the Photographies journal.

Full code can be found on GitHub.

With millions of images to pick from, it may be difficult to understand why this is my favorite image of a large-scale dataset (Fig. 2). I get it, the photo is actually very uninteresting at first glance: a woman opens a door and finds someone. But I had to look at this image more than once. And doing so, an ambiguous universe rich in possibilities soon appeared, worthy of comparison with the game of mirrors painted by Diego Velázquez in 1656 (Las Meninas) – yes, I really believe that. The woman who opens the door finds a person taking a picture of her. Behind her, a mirror reflects him, but we cannot see his reflection in its entirety because her head covers his body. We only know of this man through his reflection in the mirror that is inside the room behind her. The lack of image resolution makes it all the more dubious, just like thick brushstrokes: is she smiling at the camera? I could continue speculating on the door in the background (or its reflection?)... It seems to be closed, but could it be open in a different image?

Created by Gabriel Pereira and Bruno Moreschi.