The weird science of stock photography

This Slate article ended up in my feeds as it mentions my favourite stock photography girl (well lady now!): the Everywhere Girl. As most of you know (if you didn’t, now you do): I am fascinated by her travels in the online and print world. This reminds me that I need to use TinEye on a few of her images and see what I spot this time around. A couple of things caught my eye in :

“We had a bad day when Dolly was cloned,” says Denise Waggoner, vice president of creative research at Getty. “We hadn’t been studying biotechnology, and suddenly everyone wanted a shot of 25 sheep on a seamless white background. So now we try to keep our toes dipped in the water in lots of different fields, so we can be ready.”

And the fact that the list of most popular search terms for 2006, 2007 and the first half of 2008 all include: business, people, and woman. (Woman climbed from eighth to fifth to first).

As a rule of thumb, the lifespan of an image depicting contemporary fashions and technology is roughly four years. “That’s the maximum shelf life for, say, a woman walking down the street talking on a cell phone,” says Waggoner. “After that, she’s retro.” – unless of course she is the Everywhere Girl!