Hide The Pain Harold is my fave stock photo meme person pic.twitter.com/inlZYkcATx — ᴍɪʀʏᴀʜ (@miryadel) November 30, 2015

You may not recognise him by name – but by face? Oh, you’ll remember.

We’ve seen his face used as a meme so many times that we’d forgotten he was even a real person.

But luckily, one Reddit user hadn’t – and we’re so damn grateful to them.

This is Harold – to jog your memory.


Harold is the best stock photo model pic.twitter.com/tGqJMdMCco — Andrew (@BIG_AD_) February 3, 2016

Still don’t remember? Let’s clear things up. THIS is Harold.

Harold the stock photo guy ??? pic.twitter.com/V9A4RbZvdd — Connor Pickering (@___fathead) November 26, 2015

Harold is the stock photography guy at the heart of everyone’s favourite memes.

And Harold, my friends – is real. And alive – as he so helpfully pointed out in a post to Russian Facebook page Vkontakte, that says: ‘I’m alive!’

This then led to an interview with him where he revealed his rise to stock photography stardom.



Apparently, he was contacted by a stock photographer via a Hungarian social media site and agreed to a photoshoot – which led to the legendary pictures we’ve all grown to love so much.

After becoming a stock photo icon, Harold – whose real name is Arató András (but we’ll stick to Harold because truthfully, that’s all we can see him as now) – made an appearance on a Hungarian TV show, but nobody grasped who he actually was.

Probably because he wasn’t wearing such a pained-looking smile.

Of course, the Reddit community were thrilled with their fellow user’s findings. And they reacted the only way they knew how.

He’s quite groovy, is Harold.

Oh, and Harold has a normal job too – not the modelling contract you’d expect – he’s actually a lighting engineer.

After outing himself, Harold was interviewed by a local TV show. But it has since been deleted from the internet, so we can only quote what has been reported by the Reddit user.

Harold was interviewed on National TV (Picture: RTL)

Apparently, Harold said: ‘It feels strange that something like a simple photoshoot that started out as an interesting game, got such an afterlife.

‘It is even more strange to experience that weird impressions mean more in the world of media than decades of work experience. I will always see myself as a lighting engineer, not a photo model. At this point though, I can’t do anything but abide by the old saying: when you can’t change something, make the most of it.’

See the full post and extensive variety of Harold memes here.

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