Welcome to the first installment of Absurd Stock Photography. Not sure what stock photography is? Well, allow me to explain: It’s a comprehensive library of photographs usually used by advertisers without the time or cash to orchestrate a commercial photo shoot. Instead, they find existing photos that they can attach to their products and services. There are plenty of stock websites like Gettyimages, Corbis and Istockphoto—to name a few. Stock images are used all over the place—print ads, websites, banners and even T.V. The problem is, these pictures weren’t shot with any particular idea in mind, so they tend to be horribly generic—and in many cases, absurd. And when you spend your days combing through copious amounts of crappy advertising (the way I do), you can actually see patterns emerging in the stock imagery universe. This blog series is dedicated to demonstrating some of those patterns.
Lets start with “old people using computers”. If you type “old people” and “computers” into any stock library search field, you’ll find thousands of images. The first thing you’ll probably notice is that many of the old people in the photos look positively delighted. This of course, is completely unrealistic as most old people fear technology even more than they fear Jack Kevorkian. Anyway, here’s a sample of stock photography used by some pretty high-profile advertisers (who shall remain anonymous). I’ve removed the adspeak that originally accompanied these images and replaced it with my own captions.
