International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

Extract

Stock photography is the name given to a particular type of standardized commercial imagery. This largely consists of clichéd photographs of consumer well-being or corporate achievement: the happy couples on sun-drenched beaches pictured in travel adverts, and the well-groomed businessmen shaking hands who tend to grace company brochures (→  Advertisement, Visual Characteristics of ). Stock photography is also the name of the industry that manufactures, promotes, and distributes these images for use in →  Marketing , →  advertising , publishing, and increasingly multimedia products, websites, and other digital platforms (for instance, the sunsets and cloud images one can find on mobile phones). Worth an estimated US$2 billion annually, the industry continues to expand into new areas of image production and supply: its leading corporations own some of the most important historical photographic archives, manufacture and market stock film footage, and compete with traditional sources of →  photojournalism. Despite the ubiquity of its products, and estimates that it supplies a majority of the photographs used in advertising and marketing, the stock photography industry is largely overlooked by researchers into photography and consumer culture (exceptions include Miller 1999 ; Frosh 2003 ; Machin 2004 ), and is invisible to the general public. Stock photography emerged as a full-fledged, ... log in or subscribe to read full text