Transgender people are appearing more often in advertisements and mass media. But when they do, it’s very often in stock photos that show them standing against a blank wall, or else they are hardly seen at all. The most used stock photos are close-ups of their hands holding the symbol for transgender pride, without their faces or other defining features visible.

Stock photographs — which appear in ads, brochures and magazines, and are supposed to seem familiar and inviting — are one measure of how a society sees itself. Transgender people exist, the photographs seem to say, but at a distance — not as full-fledged people, leading individual lives and interacting in the world.

Most people “are shown in relation to their abilities and relationships, whereas transgender individuals are just represented as being transgender,” said Giorgia Aiello, an associate professor at the University of Leeds in Britain, who has studied how Getty Images has shaped the politics of gender. “Mainstream society may be perfectly happy to visually include transgender and other nonconforming gender identities, as long as these individuals are not fully participating in social life.”