A quick take about an article on a french opinion website about stock images.
They are everywhere now since everything has to be illustrated and a text without images is considered as a dry text that won’t be read. Note that one could look at it another way, publish fewer but better images (or, to avoid the trap of aesthetic judgment, images more specific to the text they accompany), but this is opposed to another trend: the atomization of long texts into short passages that must be read independently of each other and that are, therefore, all illustrated — to make sure they are read. So, small, non-specific texts with small, non-specific images. What aesthetics is it about?
It must be said that they are convenient to use: they are innumerable, technically perfect (blur and chiaroscuro are rare), cover almost every imaginable subject (or even unimaginable as shown by many WTF examples cited in the article).
Images reduced to archetypes
In a 10-year-old article, Meghan Garber (The Atlantic) writes :
What, exactly, is “stock impact”? One of the more wacky/wondrous elements of stock photos is the manner in which, as a genre, they’ve developed a unifying editorial sensibility. To see a stock image is, Potter Stewart-style, to know you’re seeing a stock image. And while stock images’ stockiness may be in part due to the common visual tropes that give them their easy, cheesy impact — prettiness, preciousness, pose-iness — there’s part of it that’s more ephemeral, too.
Their main quality is to be generic, non-specific to a given subject, simplified, reduced to an archetype.
Stéphane Degoutin and Gwenola Wagon give the example of a search on Pixabay, a database of amateur free stock photos.
We find models with faces that are too particular (that we could imagine recognizing in the street), less appropriate clothes (a shirt with flashy stripes, or a size that is too big), backgrounds that are not neutral enough (a wallpaper), lighting that is less harmonious (with shadows that are too harsh), etc.
This “real” image would convey a very different message: it would perhaps evoke a reportage, but would not do the trick for a journalist looking to illustrate an article, because it would not give the archetypal idea of the function. The smoother stock image does not describe a particular human being or situation, but communicates the qualities associated with that function.
Better than generic, these images are empty. Literally. They are ready to be filled with the meaning of the accompanying text.
False discourse, fully accepted
A friend of mine, a photographer, used to make ends meet by stocking an image bank. He regularly took our portraits, including one of a twenty-something woman with short hair and, that day, a cigarette in her mouth; it was published in a medical journal with the caption: “At 15, one boy in three smokes”. The statistic was right, but not the picture. Or rather, the image was filled with another reality: it was no longer this 20-year-old woman but a 15-year-old boy.
However, they produce an extremely pernicious vision of the world, which we know to be false but which we do not question. Too used to this type of false discourse, we accept it as is.
This forgetfulness is not magic, but rather illusionism. They are used to spread clichés in the media about the evils of our world. By systematically replacing everything by its cleaned version, they form an immense cleaning device, which screens the real. In these images, which only preserve the surface of reality, and which constantly affirm themselves as false, nothing is unpleasant to look at, nothing is unbearable, nothing can account for the climate catastrophe in progress. These images contribute to making us forget everything that disturbs us, to replace it with a smooth and clean equivalent, a world where even the conflict is reduced to a simple surface.
