The Image Factory New Technologies/New Cultures Series General Editor: Don Slater, London School of Economics New Technologies/New Cultures will draw together the best scholarship, across the social science disciplines, that addresses emergent technologies in relation to cultural transformation. While much contemporary literature is caught up in wild utopian or dystopian pronouncements about the scale and implications of change, this series invites more grounded and modulated work with a clear conceptual and empirical focus. The series draws on a wealth of dynamic research agendas, from Internet and new media scholarship to research into bio-sciences, environmentalism and the sociology of consumption. Series ISSN: 1472–2895 Previous titles published in this series: Brenda Danet, Cyberpl@y: Communicating Online Elizabeth Shove, Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality The Image Factory Consumer Culture, Photography and the Visual Content Industry Paul Frosh Oxford • New York First published in 2003 by Berg Editorial offices: 1st Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford, OX4 1AW, UK 838 Broadway, Third Floor, New York, NY 10003-4812, USA © Paul Frosh 2003 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berg. Berg is an imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 1 85973 637 8 (Cloth) 1 85973 642 4 (Paper) Typeset by JS Typesetting Ltd, Wellingborough, Northants. Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, Guildford and King’s Lynn. www.bergpublishers.com For Caroline Contents Acknowledgements ix 1 Introduction: The Making of Ordinary Images 1 2 From the Library to the Bank: The Emergence of Stock Photography 35 3 Shooting for Success: Stock Photography and the Production of Culture 49 4 The Archive, the Stereotype and the Image- Repertoire: Classification and Stock Photography 91 5 The Image of Romance: Stock Images as Cultural Performances 117 6 Rhetorics of the Overlooked: The Communicative Modes of Stock Images 145 7 And God Created Photoshop: Digital Technologies, Creative Mastery and Aesthetic Angst 171 8 The Realm of the Info-Pixel: From Stock Photography to the Visual Content Industry 193 9 Epilogue 215 Sources and Bibliography 219 Index 233 vii Acknowledgements This book would not have been possible without the support and interest of colleagues, students and mentors at the Department of Communication and Journalism at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, especially Yosefa Loshitzky, Brenda Danet and Yeshayahu Nir who provided wise counsel and consistent encouragement throughout my original research on stock photo- graphy. Various branches of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem provided essential help at crucial moments: the Authority for Research and Development generously contributed to the purchase of images for this book, the Smart Family Communications Foundation funded much of the fieldwork, and the Fellowship Committee generously supported a very productive and pleasant stay at the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, London, during which I extended and refined some of my original ideas. I was also helped greatly by the stimulating and constructively critical comments of participants in the various gatherings at which I have presented aspects of my work: in Israel at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Haifa University and Tel Aviv Uni- versity; in the UK at the University of Westminster, at Goldsmiths College, and the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for the Advanced Studies in the Humani- ties; and in the USA at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Indiana. More recently, Don Slater’s astuteness and enthusiasm have been invaluable, as have the professionalism, amicability and patience of Kathryn Earle and the staff at Berg. I am also extremely grateful to the many professionals – too numerous to name – who acted as sources and guides to the world of stock photography, and who generously gave time and consideration to my unusual requests and often naive questions. Here I owe a special debt for my initial exposure to the stock business (first as a client and only later as a researcher) to Marcus Sheff, Cheral Druck, Ilan Peeri and Andrea Stern. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their understanding, tolerance and (very) occasional excitement while I have been working on this book. Caroline, to whom the book is dedicated, for love, good sense and even better humour. Gefen and Tomer for the happiest of distractions, however cross I might occasionally have seemed, and baby Nitzan for the alternating exhaus- tion and excitement that accompanied revisions to the final draft. My father ix Acknowledgements for his periodic but effective nudging about the book’s progress and for a lifetime of moral support. And my mother, who would have been made so happy by this book’s publication and who is so sorely missed by us all. This book has been written as a cohesive, and I hope coherent, work. Never- theless, some parts of it have been published elsewhere as shorter articles. Sections of Chapters 2 and 3 draw on material that was first published as ‘Inside the Image Factory: Stock Photography and Cultural Production’, Media, Culture & Society, 23(5), 2001: 625–46 and ‘To Thine Own Self Be True: The Discourse of Authenticity in Mass Cultural Production’, Communi- cation Review 4(4), 2001: 529–45. Parts of Chapter 6 refine arguments first aired in ‘Rhetorics of the Overlooked: On the Communicative Modes of Advertising Images’, Journal of Consumer Culture 2(2), 2002: 171–96, while Chapters 7 and 8 use some of the material that appears in ‘And God Created Photoshop: Digital Technologies and the Stock Photography Industry’ in Larry Gross, John Stuart Katz and Jay Ruby (eds), Image Ethics in the Digital Age, University of Minnesota Press, 2003. x Introduction: The Making of Ordinary Images 1 Introduction: The Making of Ordinary Images This book is about the making of ordinary, mass-produced, photographic images. The kinds of image that we encounter many times each day as we pass by advertising billboards, turn the pages of newspapers, flick through maga- zines, glance at publicity brochures, and – increasingly for many of us – traverse windows and websites on our computer screens. Yet although these images are ubiquitous, they are also so unexceptional that our encounters with them seem to have no duration, and are not marked off as noteworthy events or experiences. They are, in fact, the sort of everyday images that we hardly give a thought to, that escape our attention, that we barely recall and that we struggle to place. Neither compelling nor arresting nor intriguing in any way, they can seem almost deliberately inconspicuous, as though designed not to attract attention or detain the eye. Part of the background, unremarkable and effectively ‘invisible’, they are routinely overlooked by most of their viewers, most of the time. They are the wallpaper of consumer culture. Of course, calling such images ‘ordinary’ begs quite a few questions. What does being ordinary entail? What distinguishes ordinary, overlooked images from those which stand out, catch our eye, grab our attention, and become the focus not only of our personal interest but even of public discussion? Is ‘ordinariness’ a quality of the content of certain photographs, of their place- ment within particular media contexts and viewing situations (making them potentially extraordinary in other circumstances), of our viewing habits and attitudes toward them, or of all these things together? And since, by our own admission, these images are ordinary, why bother writing a book about them? Surely the fact that they escape our notice indicates their insignificance within the greater scheme of things: pictures so banal and uninteresting that they have no value for us in the present, let alone any lasting importance for our culture and society. 1 The Image Factory A chief theme of this book is that the ordinariness of these images is neither naturally given nor easily achieved. Rather, it is a result of an elaborate system of manufacture, distribution and consumption that is itself largely concealed from view. Just as these images are so unremarkable as to seem invisible, so the system that creates them is for the most part unknown outside a relatively small coterie of ‘image specialists’ in advertising, marketing, design and a number of other media professions. And this despite the fact that this system is actually quite big business: a billion-dollar industry, known variously as ‘stock photography’ and ‘the visual content industry’, which is not only responsible for an estimated 70 per cent of the images used in advertising, marketing and design, but which owns some of the most important historical photographic archives and the digital reproduction rights to much of the world’s fine art.1 So our ordinary, everyday visual environment is the product of hidden forces. It is tempting to conclude from this that we are the victims of some horrific conspiracy. Obscure powers systematically producing the images that consti- tute the visual background to our lives while escaping our conscious attention: it almost sounds like the plot of a paranoid sci-fi thriller. This book does not entirely endorse such a view. The creation of visual ordinariness is not a streamlined and predictable affair, and while there are certainly crucial political dimensions involved – who creates our visual environment, for what purpose and with what effects – there are plenty of muddles and messes generated by the conflicts, misunderstandings and indifference that exist between various parties, not to mention the internal contradictions inherent within the produc- tion system itself.