Search for the phrase “social media” in any stock photography site, and I guarantee you’ll find all five variations in ample supply. I can count five such variations on this theme: word-cloud, Scrabble tiles, highway sign, chalkboard and whiteboard-scribble. The “Scrabble tiles” stock photography meme.įail to search with a concrete metaphor in mind, and you’ll be stuck with one of several “business concept” stock-photo memes, in which an abstract principle is just spelled out in a visual setting.
#Stock photo sense license
For numbered list posts, searching for the actual numeral is a good failsafe, revealing a gritty array of wall murals, door numbers, license plates, numbers-in-the-world. For “cybersecurity,” search for strong padlocks. For “customer retention,” look for plugged-up leaky buckets. I need to take the mental leap necessary to illustrate a slippery business abstraction. This frequent need has taught me to approach image-searching with concrete visual metaphors firmly in mind. I turn to stock photography, both paid and royalty-free, constantly for my corporate clients when they need something to illustrate blog posts about business or financial topics. With this post, I’m doing my little part to help these images achieve all those things. But what they do want is wide distribution, image attribution (often but not always), and to stand out amid a crowded sea of look-alikes. Royalty-free stock photos-like the ones pictured above-may not want your payment for using them. The photo wants its textual companion, the words that make sense of its existence, that explain it more fully.
#Stock photo sense Patch
That statement is perfectly fitting for stock photography, where every image is destined to illuminate-if wanly-a corporate PowerPoint presentation, a nicotine patch ad, a blog post on customer retention. What images “want” also suggests a lack or incompleteness, something the image doesn’t contain itself but requires from viewers to fulfill its mission. If we run with this outlandish premise and think of images as half-alive, it follows logically that they’d have desires, feelings, fears. If you doubt the mystical status of images, Mitchell writes, imagine taking a photo of your mother and gouging the eyes out of it. No matter how dispassionately we try to evaluate a graphic design, or parse a cerebral ad, or confront a challenging painting, we can never be fully rational in relating to images. Mitchell is wondering aloud why we humans tend to regard images animistically, as if they have sentient life. The question is more than just a cute thought experiment. Mitchell in a 2005 book of the same name, which I’ve been reading recently. “What do pictures want?” asks visual culture scholar W.J.T. In a strangely endearing way, she seems fully “in” on the joke, which makes the inherent weirdness of the initial shot somehow friendlier.
#Stock photo sense full
Is she happily shopping or identity-thieving? Is that lacy tank top just questionable office wear (as, indeed, a pure-white suit already is) or is her actual bustier on full display? Is she computing under klieg lights on a 405 overpass? (The jaunty palm trees, forlorn office towers, and clearly avocational sex-worker aesthetic: this all screams pure suburban L.A.) Or is she green-screening her sunset fantasies into a drab worker-bee setting? Similar images of her from the same rights-free site suggest a miniature story behind this photo shoot. But there’s SO MUCH else packed into this image that’s impossible to explain away. Plenty of pent-up demand for those elements.
Also obviously, an attractive woman in a business suit. What elements did this image-maker think were important to include to satisfy his eventual image-seeker? Obviously, a sleek white laptop (off-brand Mac). Bad examples of those rules reveal the buried conventions of the form.Ĭonsider this curious pearl coughed up recently when searching a royalty-free images site for the term “woman laptop.” (Here I must credit Adam Marks, Mister Perspicacious, who found this image and shared gleefully with me.) It’s caption-copy gold!Īn all-time winner for fascinatingly awful stock photography. Why are bad images so very intriguing? Here’s why: Stock photography is hedged on all sides, both by unspoken “rules” and the inchoate needs of image-searchers. Third: The two previous statements form an interesting tension worthy of examination. Second: something about the truly terrible images-as opposed to the merely uninspired ones-can be thunderously beautiful. First: stock photography sites are packed, in surprisingly equal measures, with both great and terrible images. Let us start by acknowledging three universal facts.
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