07/21/10: Stock Photo Fatigue
As a designer that primarily works with nonprofits, I need to bring in most of my projects under a tight budget. Because of this, I use a lot of stock photography. A LOT. I have combed the stock sites under client command for everything from a close up of a hypodermic needle to a cat hunting in a patch of clover to an “ethnically diverse” woman breastfeeding. In my searches I see many permutations of the same tired concepts. I’ve created a very unscientific categorization of these cliches. (#1 is at the top, it’s one of my all time “favorites.”) Click the image at right for samples from the rest of the top 10 categories that make me want to punch my screen. (No, I don’t know how to make the picture larger on this blog post, it just resizes the images automatically.)
As you can see, I sometimes find the process of searching for stock photos fairly tedious. Let’s just say I did not have to hunt very hard to find the pictures shown here. But sometimes, while I’m cruising around looking for a generic medical shot (often ends up being a stethescope or a bottle of pills or a hand on a medical file), I find photos that make me go huh? or ew, why? Just when I was thinking I should make a follow-up blog post about this, I discovered someone already has an entire blog devoted to this at http://awkwardstockphotos.com/. Enjoy! Now I’m going to return to my quest of finding an image of a racially diverse classroom.