I have always found stock photography hilarious. Those perfect, smiling models eating salad, high-fiving each other, and pointing at flipcharts in boardrooms. But then, 20 pages deep into a search, I noticed an image of a man sitting in front of a Christmas tree with a gun pressed against his forehead, cradling a bottle of whisky.

A jarringly bleak image, supposedly illustrating the very real, very serious issue of seasonal affective disorder. But presented so bluntly, in such an absurdly literal manner that it accidentally became funny. And that was the seed of what would eventually grow into the Twitter account Dark Stock Photos, where I harvest the likes of iStock and Getty for the saddest, bleakest images I can find.

There are so many to love, like Crying Boy on Coast, where a five-year-old boy holds his head in his hand, distraught, with a pistol in the other. Or Mourning Woman, in which a woman kneeling by a dead man’s coffin smiles mischievously at the camera.

In Danger on the Road Caused by Drunken Driver a man hands you, his passenger, an open bottle of beer as he drives horizontally across a busy motorway. And Fat Man Playing Naughty Santa Claus depicts a topless, unshaven man wearing a Santa hat and tweaking his nipples.

So many questions. Why do these photos exist? Who is buying them? And to illustrate what? A few may have been slipped in by a photographer as a joke, but I get the sense that most of them were taken in earnest. The more I think about that, the funnier they are and, judging by the almost 80,000 people following the account – which I only started on 2 June – people seem to agree.

The reaction has been equal parts amusement and bewilderment, with some people even questioning whether I set these up myself. But every photo is real and available to buy, should you ever need an image of a girl taking a cheery selfie with an AK-47.

I do have to be careful. A lot of the photos I find are just depressing, and I’ve noticed a disproportionate number of images depicting violence against women on these websites. So I carefully curate @darkstockphotos, making sure the examples I post are either funny or so preposterous that you can’t take them seriously. And thanks to the bizarre artifice of stock photography, I’m never short of material.