In Search of Stock(y) Photography

Odalisca, Fernando Botero, 1998

I work for a company that manufactures fitness equipment. While working on a new marketing piece, I found myself in the seemingly normal situation of needing a general stock photograph of an overweight person. Given that the majority of Americans are overweight, acquiring this picture should be no big deal, right? Well, I was mistaken.

Actually, I needed several stock pictures of different "real" people, and quickly found my fill of extremely attractive models in every conceivable fitness pose. But I noticed something else: as I was clicking through page after page, I hadn't been able to download anyone who was overweight. So I went to the search field and narrowed it to just "overweight people."

Overweight People: 164 results.

Only 164 results! So then I changed my search to the less politically correct "fat people:"

Fat People: 470 results.

Not only were there just a few pictures in these catagories, they were almost all unusable. The vast majority of the results were simply more images of generally fit, attractive, and muscular people. The rest were either random photos or — oddly — pregnant women. (Since when was a pregnant woman "fat" by default?)

For fun, I searched for "attractive people," already knowing the number would be big, and sure enough, I was right:

Attractive People: 39,350 results.

That's right: in the alternate universe of stock photography, attactive people outnumber fat people 84 to one.

There's no question that corporate design has been overrun by stock photography: from a business standpoint, there's no reason why it shouldn't be. It's cheap (download 25 10 - 50 megabyte photos a day for just over a hundred bucks a month) and quick. Stock photo sites are like a candy store of concepts: bright, colorful, crisp, tasty, and endless in variety. (And some would argue that using stock photos, as opposed to well thought out original photography or illustration, is like just like eating candy as opposed to real food.)

But what struck me the most here is how the business model of stock photography — make available the pictures you know people will like, because those pictures sell — is a direct reflection of our worldview. As a culture, we have taken the idea of "overweight" and completely blocked it out. Even though the majority of Americans are overweight, their appearance in run of the mill, stock-photo-driven advertising is extremely limited.

Additionally, the use of these images, if you can find them, is relegated to niche issues: you use a picture of an overweight person only if you're talking about, say, poor fitness, and that's it. It is similar to years past when someone in a racial majority might only use the picture of a person in a minority group when dealing with a "minority issue," instead of including pictures like these on a day to day basis, as most of us try to do now. But interestingly, these days this "advertising discrimination" has been reversed: designers and photographers, the majority of whom are overweight, just like everyone else, are avoiding the majority.