Speculative Stock Photography

You can hardly open a website or walk down a city street without encountering a piece of stock photography. What would it mean to intervene in the marketplaces behind them?

Getty Images is the dominant player in the stock photography market. Re-selling images from thousands of photographers, Getty is the first place that advertisers, editors and others go when they need an image to match a concept. In this, Getty holds an incredibly privileged position in shaping the zeitgeist’s visual language.

But exactly what role do companies like Getty play in setting the terms of the social imaginary? How does what’s “seeable” interact with what’s “sayable”? What is it that makes a stock image successful today? (This, at least, is something that Getty’s own research team reports on regularly).

To the extent that the stock-photography market can be seen as a visual index of society “in the eyes of” capitalism, stock images invite intervention. What could a speculative stock photography look like? How can alternative futures be imagined and shaped by playing with such a system? What would we want the world to look like?

Speculative Stock Photography is an on-going project with the members of Dark Inquiry investigating these questions.