Stock Photography, A word please
By Monica Pedraja
Hey stock photography world, we can do better.
I work in the travel industry. I am also a POC who looks through stock images everyday. Why do I have to click through five pages before I see my first person of color? Sure, it’s gotten better over the years, though very slowly. Yes, personalization works because now after years of collecting data knowing which photos I select, I get what I need on page 1. Why did I have to put “African-American” or “Asian” in front of a noun to see diversity? And why is there still such a clear disparity in the quantity, quality and range of content featuring BIPOC?
Representation is crucial. Growing up in a predominantly white suburb, I gravitated towards Asian Americans in the media like Kristi Yamaguchi or Claudia from the Baby-Sitters Club. It wasn’t until my early twenties that I realized the reason I loved them was because they were Asian, and they reminded me of me. Seeing familiar faces in media makes me feel like I can be part of the conversation - that there is opportunity for me to be seen and my voice to be heard. When stock image searches only surface images of business people, travelers, and families who are white, it reinforces the notion that white is the standard, and the ideal.
Photography plays a fundamental role in setting up unconscious biases. What one might think is a subtle act, could have a significant, lasting and problematic impact. Take post-production lightening of skin-tones in magazines as an example. In many Asian cultures, lighter skin is the ideal leading to high sales of whitening products. I remember walking in a grocery store with my family in Manila and hearing my teenage cousin ask her mom to buy her whitening cream. The “Shirley” card that was created for photo labs to ensure color balance only had a white woman on it. Women of color weren’t incorporated until after furniture and chocolate companies demanded Kodak fix their film to better render their brown products. Meanwhile, photography has a long dark history as a tool of oppression and colonization, yet many photography students are taught the cleaned-up white narrative of photographic history. It was only recently that I learned about James Van Der Zee as an early Black photographer in the Harlem Renaissance. I honestly can’t even recall learning about any photographers of color in my undergrad (2006-2010).
Sources: Left - Wikipedia | Right - Williams College Museum of Art
When we understand the impact that images make on individuals and culture at large, the next step is to look for ways to critique and transform the media being produced and distributed. Content creators and curators short on time won’t sift through multiple pages to find a good image showing diversity. I know this. I’ve done this. The majority of my work day consists of combing through photos for social media and blog articles. It was early on that I began to consciously select photos showcasing proper representation. It was around 2016 that I really became aware of the severe lack of diversity, and I was primarily working with Shutterstock.
A year later we moved to iStock, and it was a slight improvement. The personalization was quick to learn my search behavior, and the quality of photos was improving as well. Most recently we added Stocksy to the mix. It’s the most diverse and stylistic of the three, and I recommend this site for images with people.
I was moved by the powerful revival of the Black Lives Matter movement and my reflections circled back around to my passion for change within stock photography. Have these platforms gotten better? Have they responded to BLM? I decided to do some digging.
There have been some actions by these brands to show support:
iStock and Stocksy hero images on their homepage show lifestyle images of black people.
Shutterstock has a curated section below the fold entitled, “People Power.”
iStock statement from their parent company, Getty Images
Shutterstock statement and blog post outlining their commitment
Stocksy statement
Then I went deeper and tested the platforms as a “new” user would experience them. I took the three stock agencies I’ve worked with and did a search using the same keywords under incognito mode sifting through 10 pages, counting the number of photos with black representation.
iStock “father”
Stocksy “travel”
Shutterstock “couple”
A wave of disappointment came over me as I looked at those numbers over and over again. It’s glaringly obvious there is major work needed to improve black travel. The numbers, while higher than I expected, are still low in the big picture. Thirty-nine photos of black travelers out of 1000? According to a report from Mandala Research, Black Americans spent $63 billion in travel, and we can’t get more photos?
I’m certainly not the first person to notice this, my colleagues have the same thoughts. There are multiple articles reflecting the same ideas - Trina Rimmer’s piece focuses on representation under the scope of eLearning, and a huge shout out to the ShADEs group at Shutterstock for publishing “Why We Need to Talk About Black Representation in Photography.”
On the flip-side there was this problematic article (and one equally aggravating comment) written in Selling-Stock.com that missed the point completely and instead, placed blame and deflected.
Moving forward these are some thoughts I will be posing to stock agencies. What percentage of your contributing photographers are black? Is there representation in your leadership team? The act of sourcing diverse images shouldn’t fall only on the user. As the company who controls the platform, you should encourage diversity by having all races, body types, ages, sexual orientations and accessibility show up on your first pages; support and push for your contributors to capture life beyond stereotypes, normative culture, and what is readily available to them.
Content creators and curators, we can also do better. We need to be constantly requesting the agencies for inclusive imagery. Contributing photographers - are you consciously making an effort to work with black models? Are you consciously making an effort to represent all faces, and not limit to a certain look? Don’t be a Hans, the one commenter from the Selling-Stock article.
Aside from making better choices with image selection, we can also look into using images from these agencies/ pages:
I would also visit Shutterstock’s blog and iStock and Getty Image’s call for contributors page for tips on how to take good diverse images.
There’s still a long way to go, but I acknowledge the steps that have been taken so far. As someone who always tries to believe the good in people, I’m hopeful we will see the quantity and quality of images evolve for the better over time. I will continue to make my conscious decisions and push for representation from my corner. This is a partnership, and we have to keep working together to see change and sustain it.