

Ben Wiseman

Say you're making a website and want to include a picture of a female CEO. Where would you get one? You could go to a stock-photography site and search for “female CEO” or “female boss.” What you’d get: a woman in a pencil skirt and high heels, looming threateningly over a cowering man, or a woman in a power suit waving her fist at you. Subtle! And this is only the tip of a surreal iceberg of ludicrous imagery.

Stock photography is one of the strangest features of our highly visual, Tumblrized media landscape. More and more people throw photos onto sites—and more and more news agencies, strapped for cash, resort to using cheapo stock photos.

The problem is that most of this photography is desperately hackneyed. Search for “work” at a stock-photo site and you’ll get grinning corporate replicants shaking hands over some totally rad deal they’ve apparently just signed. Search for “family” and see phalanxes of white middle-class Stepford moms, dads, and kids. Journalist Jessica Bennett tells how a gender studies researcher at Stanford searched for an image of a female plumber and got women in lingerie, holding wrenches. When Hend Amry, a Libyan-American writer, searched for “Arab” to find stock pictures for a friend’s website, she found images of masked terrorists holding machine guns, sheikhs posing beside oil rigs, and a woman in a head covering holding a knife in her mouth. “I did a double take,” she says, half laughing and half fuming. Amry put the worst offenders on a Tumblr with acid captions, and it went viral. Funny, but as Amry points out, these images have existential freight. “They’re defining the boundaries of what an Arab is,” she adds. “It becomes iconic.”

Let me be blunt: Stock photography needs to die. In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell argued that clichéd language produces clichéd thinking. Using a stale image, as he’d put it, “makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” Stock photography imprisons us in the same cognitive jail. Its intentionally bland images are designed to be usable in many vaguely defined situations. This produces wretched photography for the same reason Hallmark cards produce wretched poetry. We live in a visual world, communicating and thinking in pictures. When we use stock photos, we think in clichés.

The stock world may finally be reforming itself, though. This spring, Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In Foundation hired Bennett to work with Getty Images on a collection of 2,500 realistic stock photos of women and girls. Instead of Kabuki corporate dames in red boxing gloves, the collection includes women who work from home; some even have wrinkles. This isn’t just corporate do-gooderism. Customers have begun asking Getty for more true-to-life stock photos. “We’re seeing a pendulum swing toward this authentic culture,” says Pam Grossman, Getty’s director of visual trends.

But we shouldn’t wait for the pros to act. You take pictures every day, many of which I’ll bet are superb. Several photo-sharing sites let you slap on a Creative Commons license, allowing others to use your pics. (A bunch of my own pictures are on Flickr.) If everyone reading this article posted their best snapshots online, we could seed hundreds of thousands of free pictures of real things and real people in the real world. The true cure for stock photography is inside your camera phone.