While perusing a bevy of generic stock photographs last week, I was struck by the large proportion of images that range from the unconventional to the downright disturbing.
Stock photos are generic photographs people in publishing can use to illustrate things. They are supposed to be clean and edited and ready-made ways of illustrating something, communicating the subject matter of the article or accompanying text in a quick picture.
They’re a favourite on corporate websites, blogs and advertisements.
Sometimes when I put some of our stories up on the web, I like to use a stock photo to accompany them — such as a photo of a person stretching his or her back next to an article about spinal health.
There are stock photos depicting every conventional situation you can think of: people walking dogs, people jogging in the park, kids on the swing-set, fancy people dancing at a wedding, people fighting, people playing board games, people playing sports, people playing instruments, eating, laughing, hugging, crying — everything.
A close-up of a man rubbing his temples with his face scrunched up probably means he has a headache, and depending on the text it accompanies, could signify it’s a sign of stress.
Sometimes, though, they are too stereotypical.
The famous “woman laughing alone with salad” is supposed to signify health and happiness, but is so heavy-handed it’s gone full-circle to mundane.
Really, who has ever sat in a brightly-lit cafeteria alone, smiling ear-to-ear while shovelling a carefully-speared forkful of foliage into their face?
A smartly-dressed but dishevelled woman with an armload of grocery bags, a toddler unhappily tugging at her pencil skirt, and balancing three file folders with her Blackberry in the other hand plays into the ol’ stereotype of the woman who has to fight to have it all (career and children, as it were — the horror).
For every stock photo for which you can actually imagine the scenario, there are a dozen that you might not be able to picture ever actually using.
Sometimes these bland photos are so inexplicable that you may wonder why they exist at all.
For example, I find the image titled “Plant-man accesses file cabinet” picturing what appears to be a grey suit stuffed with lettuce kneeling before a filing cabinet to be distressing and utterly puzzling.
“Woman underneath a wave of laundry” features a woman surfing on a huge pile of dirty clothes that’s Photoshopped to look like it’s a cresting wave.
“Person in chicken suit” is self-explanatory, but is complicated by the jaunty stance the chicken suit wearer has.
“Caricature of a Caucasian boy as it sits in a pizza box” is a disturbing one, as it pictures a baby with a cartoonishly enlarged head holding a slice of pizza with red sauce smeared on his face.
What the title of “Three people with napkins on heads, at dining table” doesn’t tell you is they’re toasting with what appears to be chicken wings.
“Men in police uniforms riding toy motorcycles” must have been a weird one for the photographer to shoot; likewise “Man eating steak in field with cow.”
“Couple wrapped in bandages holding hands” looks like a pair of mummies having a romantic moment in a hospital waiting room.
I have no idea in which scenario the use of “Elephant trunk coming out of gift box held by girl” would be appropriate, except maybe if the accompanying text has to do with nightmares.
Some photos are worth a thousand words, and others need only three: what in tarnation?
