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Happiness is a big smile, arms open, with the wind in your hair. Family is two kids with a father and a mother, watching TV in a well-lit living room. Stress is sitting in front of a laptop, eyes closed, and your fingers pinching your nose — all of this, at least, according to mainstream stock photography.
For the uninformed, stock photos are ready-to-use images one can license from companies like Shutterstock. Over the years, they have quietly become what culture and communication scholar Giorgia Aiello describes as “the visual backbone” of a range of industries, from advertising and packaging design to journalism.
We see them in website headers and online articles (including this one!) as well as the world outside our screens, like the posters of happy shoppers you might see at the grocery and the billboards you’d pass by on the way there. Like ink and paint before it, stock photography has become a basic raw material for much of today’s visual communications.
Though stock photos can sometimes come across as hilarious meme fodder or just downright weird, there is power in their ubiquity, and it’s worth looking into the ways they reflect and shape our ideas about the world and our place in it.
A Hidden Industry Everywhere You Look
Estimated to be worth $4.1 trillion in 2020, the global stock photo industry is expected to grow aggressively in the years ahead across genres and borders. And though, like memes, they seem like fairly new phenomena, stock images are a lot older than you think.
The industry traces its roots back to the 1920s when a photographer by the name of H. Armstrong Roberts took photographs of people in front of an airplane and asked them to sign model releases. This feels like standard procedure today, but the idea of photographs as products one can sell to companies was nothing short of disruptive.
Publishers and advertisers soon realized that buying stock photos was less risky than commissioning photographers, and Roberts soon went on to create one of the first major stock photo libraries in the world.
When the internet came around, it became easier than ever for stock photo companies to amass and store images, and in turn, for potential customers to browse through them with keyword search instead of card catalogs.
This marked the birth of microstock companies, or businesses built around the production and distribution of photos that were more generic but also much cheaper than before. It also ushered in the era of fake-looking formulaic stock images, like the infamous Women Laughing Alone With Salad (and the many think-pieces on gender and representation it inspired).
From here, the aesthetics of stock photography gradually — and thankfully — developed to what we’re more familiar with today, a century since the birth of the industry: less staged, more natural light, and realer-looking people.
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As more and more photographers are laid off and in the midst of a pandemic, the more reliant publishers, newsrooms, and advertisers are becoming on pre-produced images.
Stock Images as Representation
A picture, it’s often said, is worth a thousand words. But if so, then what do images designed to be versatile enough to be sold to the widest possible range of companies but still specific enough to convey ideas like joy and family even tell us?
Sometimes, they can be dangerous. In 2015, a study by the American Academy of Pediatrics found that only around 16% of stock photos of sleeping babies showed environments that were safe. Worryingly, around one-third of the photos studied showed babies sleeping on their tummies, which actually doubles their risk of dying in their sleep.
The problem is, given the many images of babies sleeping next to stuffed animals and fluffy blankets on ads and our Instagram feeds, what is considered best for a baby’s sleep — a single fitted sheet on a firm mattress, flat on their back — now looks wrong or lonely for many parents.
In many other cases, the harm is a little less deadly, but no less detrimental. For example, stock photos of breastfeeding often show poor positioning that can be painful for mothers. Meanwhile, stock images of the elderly with dementia tend to dehumanize older folk and promote the stigma of the disease.
Moreover, the countless variations of people, usually women, photographed holding their head in their hands are now known as #headclutcher stock photos, which have come to represent mental distress.
Unfortunately, not all mental illness looks like this, and repeatedly depicting them this way keeps many from better understanding their own mental struggles and empathizing with those whose psychological issues don’t have them clutching their heads.
Stock photos also reveal interesting ideas about what it means to be certain types of people. In 2013, The Cut created an interesting slide show on what stock photography sites served when one looked up words like “career woman” and “feminist.” To say that some of them are revolting is a polite understatement.
Moreover, in the world of stock photos, to be queer is to not exist in everyday contexts like work and family. There, to be a teen with technology is to be white, female, and a techno-slave.
An Evolving Politics of Perception
A lot of these issues can be traced back to the problems of photography as a whole, which has historically been white and male-dominated. And for much of the industry’s history, stock images and their problematic effects have largely remained under the radar.
In recent years, however, organizations and stock photo companies themselves are starting to take notice and steer the genre towards better and more inclusive visuals.
For example, the World Obesity Federation provides stock images depicting people with obesity to help fight weight bias and lessen the stigma often associated with obesity. The National Disability Leadership Alliance has also partnered with Yahoo Ad Tech and Getty Images to improve the representation of different disabilities.
Earlier this year, Adobe Stock partnered with Diversity Photos to launch a set of 4,000 multicultural images to help address the industry’s racial diversity problem. The move complements the work of newer stock websites like Nappy, whose goal is to provide beautiful photos of Black and Brown people, and CreateHer, which caters specifically to melanated women.
For its part, Pexels, one of the biggest free stock photo websites in the world, also reworked its algorithm to provide more realistic and less hyper-sexualized depictions of women.
Meanwhile, Getty Images has also sought to promote less stereotypical depictions of LGBTQ+ individuals and families.
Taking Stock of Meaning
At the end of the day, stock photos aren’t direct reflections of reality. But they’re so readily available that they end up serving as stand-ins for reality anyway, everywhere we look. Whether we like it or not, they shape how ideas, people, and situations are represented in our increasingly globalized culture and, therefore, the limits of how we might imagine them.
What does love look like? And who gets to be seen in love? Would it entail a man and a woman, or two men? What age would they be? Are they hyper-sexualized? Do they have a home, kids, and a dog in the background or do they exist only in a studio?
To be successful, Getty’s Rebecca Swift points out that stock photos must connect with a “universal human experience.” But what does it mean to be universal, and where do regular people’s voices fit in an industry that caters to advertisers and publishers?
