America in Stock Photography
I spend a lot of time trolling stock photography sites, and I’m real mad about it because it turns out (SPOILER ALERT) America is racist and misogynist which is so weird considering how this whole place is constructed on a 400 year history of aggressively and gleefully pursuing slavery and genocide for the benefit of white men and the white women who submit meekly to them.
I spend a lot of time searching stock photography sites because I am a designer, and stock photography is an essential tool. I use imagery daily, whether as a finished product or sketchbook. I’ll search broad terms and ideas and spend a few hours scrolling through the world’s collected visual library of images tagged to seed and collect ideas for my work.
After the American narrative imploded for white liberals (people of color waiting resignedly for us to finally see how fucked everything is) in the election of 2016, I began the long and forever process of unpacking my own privilege in regards to my own whiteness and the safety and security it gives me in this horrifying hellscape we live in. It’s not just a difference in spirit and outlook, my eyes changed too, and I began seeing things I’d never seen before, not only in the world at large but also in the minutia of my work: like the fact that in all my stock photography searches, I hardly ever saw any people of color.
It’s different if you take the time to search for a specific skin tone. Example: type in ‘African-American having fun’ and you get exactly what you asked for.

Try typing in the much more generic ‘People having fun’ and you quickly find that algorithms interpret ‘people’ as ‘99% white people’:

A simple, generic search will yield mostly white faces, with an occasional splash of melanin thrown in.
In the rare instance when you do come across an occasional face of color, they will always, ALWAYS, be off the sides/edges of the group, never centered, never the focus.
This pattern repeats everywhere in stock photography. If you want any form of multi-ethnicism, you have to specifically type in words relating to the multiple skin colors. If you just type in the thing without specifying race, ethnicity, or color, you will get 99.9 percent white people.
The trend mutates the more you look, by the way. I thought it couldn’t get any worse, but in my recent searches for ‘love’ and ‘holding hands’ for a romance-themed design, almost every face I saw was white. Even vector figures were white. If I was lucky enough to see black, Latinx, or Asian faces, the images were 99.9% overtly sexual, instead of the sweet romanticism of the photos featuring white people. Additionally, I searched over 500 internet pages, and found exactly zero interracial couples, and those are decidedly the worst words I’ve ever had to type.
In conclusion, I’m mad. I’m mad as HELL.
We are formed by our narratives and projections, by the stories we are told and in turn, tell ourselves. This is why representation is so important, this is why breaking open the white (and 95% male) stranglehold on content and media to a range of perspectives is so important, as we begin to see the world (and ourselves) in all its fractured and spectrum-y glory, not as binaries presented to us by terrified white men who seek pleasure and validation above all else. This conversation has been happening, and it has affected some change, but not enough, and all of everything still unchanged matters. It matters in writer's rooms, it matters on screen, it matters in boardrooms and budget meetings, it matters in governance, it matters in teaching, it matters in law enforcement, it matters in offices and Q&A panels, and it matters in stock photography. What we see around us plays a huge part in who we think we are and who we want to be, and I shouldn’t have to specify skin tone in a search bar to see a range of skin tones engaged in the simplest and most human of endeavors, like ‘fun’ and ‘love’. I should be able to type ‘holding hands’ and see absolutely everyone doing so.
In this series of essays, I will screenshot and shame every algoritm that gives me 99% white people when I ask for ‘people’. Watch this space.
