Sous Fonds contains planted photographs that are the result of a project assigned by Image Arts Professor Vid Ingelevics to his Documentary Media MFA students for the course Databases, Archives and the Virtual Experience of Art. For the project, students were presented with an archive of 100 images on CD and asked to create a system to classify them. Past student Mark Laurie, who graduated from the program in 2010, chose to rely on the Dewey Decimal System and Library of Congress Subject headings to help categorize the disparate images.

The title of the project "Supplementary plates: The V.I. Fonds distribution project" describes Laurie's decision for classifying the images through placing them into library books. Each individual photograph remains connected to the others in archival fashion by fonds, acknowledging the original source and organization of the images, in a group of 100 from Vid Ingelevics.

The artist printed the images as photographs, and divided them into library books because "without knowledge of the images, provenances and the archival motivations behind their co-mingling, [Laurie] realized that by merely organizing them into batches, [he] could not hope to restore their meaning or significance." Assigning each image, or small group of similar images, a Library of Congress Subject heading, Laurie searched the Ryerson Library catalogue and chose books with identical subject headings to place the photographs in. He used the Dewey Decimal and the Library of Congress Subject heading to complete the classification of his images, and placed them into books indicating that they were "on loan" from the V.I. Fonds to that book, adding to the Ryerson Library's collection of images on that subject.