The Hidden History of Stock Photography

Book Review

In her first e-book, scholar Simona Supekar mines the historical past of inventory imagery as a vessel for racism and sexism and considers its position within the age of AI.

The time period “stock photo” sometimes conjures a sequence of pejorative modifiers: “cliché,” “flat,” “mass produced.” A baby about to blow on a dandelion. A slice of pie bleeding onto a plate. A cheerful household that one way or the other resembles everyone’s household and no one’s household —particularly if that household occurs to be White. 

In the digital age, the inventory picture is arguably the Rolodex of the creativeness; what we repeatedly see and internalize over hundreds of hours of display screen time shapes what we count on to see in the true world — which implies that racial illustration in probably the most banal “stock” imagery can show particularly insidious. In her first e-book, Stock Photo (2026), Simona Supekar writes, “These sometimes inscrutable photos act as ciphers to clue us in to ourselves even as we are becoming ourselves. They can allow us to see what we value, and what we do not.” 

The newest in Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons sequence (of which my e-book on lipstick is part), Stock Photo explores the disquieting methods during which well-liked racial hierarchies are sometimes unwittingly perpetuated by inventory pictures on-line — photographs which now inform AI-generated representations of marginalized communities. “A stock search for ‘maternity’ and ‘Indian’ on one site yields a first page of mostly AI-generated results,” Supekar writes, “signifying that these filled a gap for something that did not exist in the first place.” Early digital picture banks that reinforce racist and sexist stereotypes have served because the visible backdrop to virtually all public discourse on-line, together with memes. Photos of light-skinned Indian folks, she writes, are vastly over-represented in Getty’s huge picture assortment. In one other instance, she explains that the seek for “Black businessman” might, for a few years, disturbingly yield “an image of a Black man sitting at a bar next to lines of cocaine.”