Shake hands is about stock photos, the legal issues connected to them and its imaginary.

Stock photos provide a typology of images the more and more standardised. Their cheap prices and the wide possibilities of its use make them popular and widespread.

Every image is alike, they stack themselves, they get layered. Their production is industrial.
This phenomenon is under control of a complex legal system of contracts which is seldom ignored.
Shake hands tries to underline the importance of these texts written in a technical language and shown with a cryptic page layout.

In this book, the contracts are illustrated by images found in stock photos websites. This association undermines the industrial characteristics of stock photos questioning the specific and unique photographic image.

Incidentally, Shake hands rises questions about gender, ethnic and social representations that are embedded in some of this vernacular photography.
Photographs are meant to be unique: can they resist to this industrial production, to the evenness of meaning, to this overwhelming flow of images?