The internet LOLed in January about a collection of stock photographs, put together at Hairpin, featuring women laughing alone with salad. Stock photographs are pictures made available by photographers for a fee. Any marketer or web designer who doesn’t want or can’t afford to hire a photographer for their specific project can just use a stock photo. The supply of stock photos, then, can sometimes tell us something funny about our cultural milieu. See also mocking stock photography.
I argued that the happy salad-eating women reflected the fact that today we sell products with desire instead of necessity. What does Hairpin’s newly-identified trend in stock photography tell us about marketing in America?
More at Hairpin. Thanks to Zeyne P. and Carolyn C. for the link!
Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College and the co-author of Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
