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A page about arts and culture exchanges for youth is topped by a group shot of young people looking at a smartphone and a tablet. It comes from a photographer inBosnia and Herzegovina, who markets it with the prosaic title, “Young people sitting in a park with smart phones.”

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Even simple, generic images, such as pictures of a stack of magazines, were purchased through a stock photo agency from foreign photographers.

The department commissions photographs from Canadian photographers when time and budget allow and also maintains a collection of pictures, but “there are times when our photobank does not contain a suitable image to illustrate a specific subject,” spokesman Len Westerberg said in an email.

“In addition, the Department has developed and maintains a photobank of images, from Canadian sources; however, in those cases, the high cost of commissioning a photographer for a single, specific image cannot be justified.”

Westerberg says the department uses a Canadian-owned supplier of stock images, iStock.com.

In fact, the online stock agency, while founded by a Canadian, has been owned by Seattle-based Getty Images since 2002.

While it is certainly cheaper and faster to buy royalty-free photographs rather than commissioning a photographer, the use of stock images in political or government communications has proved controversial in the past.

In the 2014 Ontario election campaign, Tim Hudak’s Progressive Conservatives were forced to defend their use of stock footage of Russian workers from Chelyabinsk City in a video on his job creation plan, titled “Ontario Working Better.”