Like so many millennial ideas, Kenneth Wiggins’s innovation gained its momentum from social media. This April, the web designer and front-end developer posted a tweet to a now-deleted Instagram post to gauge interest in an idea he’d been tossing around in his head: “Any photographers interested in submitting work for an open source (free) stock photography site featuring African Americans?”

Wiggins had been working on a project for a client and grew frustrated when all the stock images of black people he found online felt inauthentic—pictures that hardly moved beyond the stale stereotypes that categorize the vast majority of black representation in visual culture.

BlackStockImages

“I couldn’t really find the images that invoked the messaging behind the brand visually,” Wiggins told me. “There are other resources out there that have images of black people…but just the attitude and the emotion I was looking for behind the pictures, I couldn’t find.”

Within days of his initial post, photographers had chimed in, eager to be part of the kind of platform Wiggins was proposing: a stock photography site dedicated to providing nuanced, varied images of black people. Catalyzed by the positive response, BlackStockImages took shape rapidly, its pace matching the urgency of its mission.

“The response was kind of overwhelming so I just sat down and thought about it [all] weekend and kinda hit the ground running ever since,” Wiggins said. “The original idea was to just do something small where I just uploaded images or had images uploaded [by others] and people could download them.”