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The images in this app are photographs of photographs from books in my library, made fairly casually with an iPhone. Every image is, in some sense, already a copy of a copy, stripped of its original context and set adrift, in the spirit of Sherrie Levine and Jiro Takamatsu. It’s also how images circulate now: restless, detached, endlessly recombined.

The photographs are presented without captions. We’re interested in what the pictures have to say to each other.

The ten words at the bottom indicate the Threshold Concepts that underpin PhotoPedagogy, a free resource for photography teachers and students that Chris Francis and I have been building for over ten years. Threshold Concepts are the big ideas that, once understood, change how you see a subject. They are, by definition, troublesome. The words are like signs on doors. You don’t have to open them.

Click a word to generate a pair of images. Click anywhere on the images to reveal a short text; a frame for thinking, not a set of instructions. Or ignore the text entirely and simply look at the randomly generated diptychs. Take your time. Look carefully.

— Jon Nicholls