The Hidden History of Stock Photography
In her first book, scholar Simona Supekar mines the history of stock imagery as a vessel for racism and sexism and considers its role in the age of AI.
The term “stock photo” typically conjures a series of pejorative modifiers: “cliché,” “flat,” “mass produced.” A child about to blow on a dandelion. A slice of pie bleeding onto a plate. A happy family that somehow resembles everybody’s family and nobody’s family —especially if that family happens to be White.
In the digital age, the stock photo is arguably the Rolodex of the imagination; what we repeatedly see and internalize over thousands of hours of screen time shapes what we expect to see in the real world — which means that racial representation in the most banal “stock” imagery can prove especially insidious. In her first 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 latest in Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series (of which my book on lipstick is a part), Stock Photo explores the disquieting ways in which popular racial hierarchies are often unwittingly perpetuated by stock photography online — images 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 image banks that reinforce racist and sexist stereotypes have served as the visual backdrop to almost all public discourse online, including memes. Photos of light-skinned Indian people, she writes, are vastly over-represented in Getty’s massive image collection. In another example, she explains that the search for “Black businessman” could, for many years, disturbingly yield “an image of a Black man sitting at a bar next to lines of cocaine.”
