These days, many a pocket contains a smartphone with a hidden archive of images. For his A Thousand Words Say More Than These Photos project, Steven de Kok has been scouring his friends’ and relatives’ smartphones in search of their least remarkable images – the kind that barely anyone looks at, not even the person who took them. Amongst all the holiday snaps, pictures of cats and selfies, he sometimes finds images that prompt all kinds of questions. De Kok is interested in only one question, however: why did you take this photo?

Steven de Kok (b. Goirle, 1990) is studying photography at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. His subjects are generally fairly dry and mundane. His pictures are never about the objects or events as such, however, but about the way these banal things are depicted and what they say about the society we live in. Another key focus of his work is the role of photography in today’s society.