Sexy Stock Photos Are Hurting Us

Propagating unreachable lifestyles, ideals, and bodies in the name of “art” and “beauty”

It’s not just the pictures of sexy, sad, and depthless women in the sunset, but the unrealistic, lifestyle touting propaganda that prostitute online content.

Some writers are just as guilty of selling sex to get eyes on their work as ad agencies. Too much focus over aesthetic appeal in a writer’s image choice makes me suspicious about the depth and quality of their content. If anything, it signals the story as merely content and flags me to stay away.

Stock photos still have a big problem with diversity and class and the websites are still surrogates for advertising, seeking to promote lifestyles or ideals out of reach in the name of “art” and “beauty” for capitalist exchange.

The explosion of sterilized and overly styled subjects — even the “gritty” or “edgy” ones— do not convince me stock photography has evolved from cheesy to stylish. What is trending now in the genre will soon be cheesy too. Stock photos have merely adapted to more opulent, or purposefully rustic, etc., curated imagery to hide the bullshit myth better and have us forget we are essentially looking at a capitalistic machine selling ideas at the cost of our creative energy.

Want tanned, slim legs? Surfing lessons in a paid-for trip to Hawaii in a boutique cabin room with vaulted ceilings and windows? Minimalistic surroundings for your meditation with carefully curated “cabin” furniture worth thousands? And the capitalist, minimalist myth sold in this image goes down to the coyly donned white t-shirt (for $99 on Etsy) sans pants. The simple life.

And I am getting weary of the lonely, deep guy posting poems with sexy, thin White ladies perched in a mystical world looking up wistfully, perhaps with wings and a tube top. Or maybe looking longingly out a rainy window for her shallow dreams to come true, like our friend above. These kinds of posts epitomize my outrage.

Who is falling for this? These pictures seem to be a poorly veiled radar for the lonely, horny writer while conveying women-as-objects (and perhaps not being aware of it). How are these images not perpetuating the stereotypes about women and their bodies we are trying so hard to fundamentally change? How is representation in stock photography less up for question when we routinely critique advertising and other media sources?

The system has become a simulacrum of writers using generic and unrealistic photos selling ideas and sex from photographers who are producing overrepresented subjects under the banner of art, fulfilling the meaningless demand of the genre in subject matter and choice. I fear nobody is at the helm.

Some sites are making a point of showing some diversity in bodies and identities. While many still have a sexual or commercial gaze (Pride pictures are ok when only women are kissing), these websites are still worth promoting.

Yet, when you search “couple," you are still going to get a lot of homogenous, White, hetero folks in hipster outfits, with perhaps, an “edgy” tattoo. Pay attention next time on practically any search term for any object and count how many unrelated females — usually sexy — pictures populate.

There is a world of unique, weird, and offbeat photos untapped because we are choosing the same ones ad nauseam and not even checking to see if the photo has been used multiple times on a publishing platform. To prevent over-saturation of the same images, writers can help themselves by using reverse-image searches to determine how much an image has been used in any given source and assure the selection is fresh.

While there are so many interesting images to be found with some basics on Boolean operators, some extra scrolling, and using precise descriptors, many still gravitate to the cliche. For non-content writers and poets, I cannot think of anything less enduring to service your art than becoming a victim of a trend that makes your work look like a trend too.

Paul Frosh, an academic who warns corporations are beginning to take over our visual realities, argues commercial photography is irredeemable. He asserts stock images:

so patently exemplify processes of standardization, commodification, alienation, illusion and stereotypical classification that it is hard to think of a better pedagogical example for introductory courses on the theory of the culture industry or the society of the spectacle. Moreover, its core product — the ‘generic image’ — seems an utter betrayal of the very essence of photography as the epiphanic trace of a unique referent. Stock photography, then, is doubly ‘fallen’: it is the perfect ‘bad object’ of both cultural production research and photography theory.

While more independent photographers are uploading their work on free photo sites, they are servicing it with content in demand; namely commodified culture. Somehow we went from making fun of unrealistic stock photos to embracing their fetishism for the spectacle and alienating ourselves from what they represent, or don’t. It’s anesthetizing.

Frosh goes on to state the “cultural critic stands awe-struck, overwhelmed by the purifying urge to unveil its invisibility and deconstruct its seeming banality”. Yet, talented writers and critical minds are still using terribly banal images.

“The Tao of Shutterstock: What Makes a Stock Photo a Stock Photo?” suggests the banality of the everyday is what people ultimately seek. But why not, as writers, raise the bar? We wish to avoid cliches in writing, so why do so with inauthentic images that ultimately alienate and do not reflect us?

Using images as an additional tool to communicate our ideas online is an amazing way to honor the relationship between the verbal and visual, but when I look at my feeds, I feel I am stuck again with something reflected back to me that doesn’t have values or humanity. The bodies and ideas are not mine or those of my friends and family.

Please save the pictures of the automatons for the rehashed productivity articles and the crappy love poems. We need to reckon with the kind of representation we are validating in stock images when we click the download button and consider how they may be poisoning our ideas of beauty, virtue, happiness, sex, gender, race, love, and the bodies we inhabit.

Jessica Lee McMillan © 2020 Sign up for my newsletter