I’ve been pretty pissed off as of late–I won’t even try to hide it.

Since the CD player in my car froze to death this winter, I’ve been without my metal to drown out the pestering thoughts that run amok in my mind whilst sitting in traffic. All that silence has made for good time to brood on my next invigorating rant on the mediocrity I suffer and endure daily. So if there’s one subject I’d like to focus my energy on today, something that sends me into a complete fit of intolerable rage (aside from marketers telling me to join the conversation), it’s traversing the desert of fakery that is stock imagery.

For non-designers, stock imagery is just one of the many detestable bastard sons of a capitalist society: canned bullshit pictures that’s sole aim is to act as a sort of noise and filler, even a soft propaganda, to communicate stock ideas that fill (read: waste) ad space. Its very criteria is to be as socially conversant, whorishly generic, and politically correct as possible to maintain mass acceptance and saleability.

What’s it look like? Imagine being afforded a glimpse into a parallel world, where all signs of meaning and character have been annihilated: well-manicured suits feigning interest over a laptop, ubiquitous close-ups of business handshakes, photographs of anonymous skyscrapers, gummy stick figures holding hands around a globe, pinpoints in maps, white grinning customer service reps with perfect teeth and headsets—it is anything and everything neutral that doesn’t say anything in particular, requires no permission to photograph, or a mote of good taste to purchase.

I personally find it amazing how photographers and illustrators are able to shoot or illustrate subjects like this, avoiding implicating or saying anything whatsoever, and yet still somehow arriving at an image commodity in the end. It’d be art if it wasn’t so fucking boring. But they are fathers to thousands of images with no origin or identity, free from expression, from any reference to time, place, and context. Browsing a stock image library becomes like seeing the world through the eyes of someone with severe amensia: environments systematically cleansed of meaning and character, all scenes artificial and blank, faces—blanker. It is an endless, hopeless, soul-eviscerating nihilist’s dream, an exhausting vortex of commercial lies visualized without a scrap of authenticity or veracity to the world in which we live.

Ironically, on a site of images, reading how the uploaders describe the banality of said images is usually the most entertaining aspect. I know all about SEO (search engine optimization) and providing “accurate” descriptions but these descriptions do more than simply describe but seem to almost mandate reality as authoritatively and unimaginatively as the images themselves. Every average looking female model becomes a “beautiful girl.”  ‘Confidence’ is a common tag. You can sense the drudgery and mindlessness of their job in their lifeless, unimaginative descriptions, typing and tagging images like the lobotomized thralls iStockphoto has turned them into.

But the conformity, the idealism and cultural stereotyping is sickening on these sites. Far from simply seeing people or models, I sense the tyranny of such images. I see that, if this is the visual rhetoric of corporate conversations (ugh), this is how we ought to look, to dress, to smile and interact—this is all Acceptable. Because corporate HR values, no doubt the patron and target audience of stock image websites, is the new golden section for how we ought to look and behave, both professionally and personally. Kodak moments have become stock photo moments as Jim DiSpirito, a colleague at work, so aptly put it. These propagandist visions seem so vivid and complete that I’m surprised there aren’t images for the more private aspects of life as well, teaching us what proper fellatio, defecation and childbirth ought to look like.

Jean Baudrillard, the late French cultural theorist and post-structuralist who I continue to read and admire (and sometimes laugh at), writes quite lucidly in his essay “The Evil Demon of Images,” on not stock imagery but images in general and their referent.

“It is precisely when [images] appear most truthful, most faithful and most in conformity to reality that the image is most diabolical.”… “The immense majority of present day photographic, cinematic and television images are thought to bear witness to the world with a naïve resemblance and a touching fidelity. We have spontaneous confidence in their realism. We are wrong.”

While Baudrillard goes on to explain how he believes film events conspire to produce real events (but that the film events are the true events—‘real’ events the simulacrum), his disbelief in a dialectical between image and reality, etc., another passage jumps out and seems to ring true for my purposes:

“…the image has taken over and imposed its own immanent ephemeral logic; an immoral logic without depth, beyond good and evil, beyond truth and falsity; a logic of the extermination of its own referent, a logic of the implosion of meaning in which the message disappears on the horizon of the medium.”

Diabolic, nihilistic, immoral: these are the only words to describe stock imagery.

But I get it, this path of least resistance for stock image users. I get that stock imagery’s demand arose out of the recognition that companies who use this stuff really aren’t so different from each other: that they’re all interested in globalization and expansion, that everyone wants to communicate the same messages of friendly customer service, trustworthy business partners, and efficiency in the same processed, entirely meaningless way.

Maybe it serves a purpose, maybe I complain too much, or maybe I’m right in what I see. However it is, for sticking with me to the very end, I’ll leave you with the most titillating photos I was able to find on iStockphoto, and another insightful quote by Baudrillard:

“The fatality lies in this endless enwrapping of images (literally: without end, without destination) which leaves images no other destiny than images. … In the absence of rules of the game, things become caught up in their own game: images become more real than the real; cinema itself becomes more cinema than cinema, in a kind of vertigo in which it does no more than resemble itself and escape in its own logic, in the very perfection of its own model.” —Jean Baudrillard, The Evil Demon of Images

Tags: generic, i hate stock imagery, i hate stock photos, istockphoto, jean baudrillard, opinion, rant, simulation, stock photography, the evil demon of images, worthless

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 9th, 2011 at 4:23 pm and is filed under opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.