Shifting the depiction of women in stock imagery
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On Monday, however, the massive stock photography company Getty Images announced a partnership with LeanIn.org, the organization started by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg to advance women's issues. Together they have created a library of 2,500 stock images, called the Lean In Collection, that features new, more empowering portraits of women in addition to drawing on the best (that is, least stereotypical) of Getty's existing images.
Seeing as Getty photography is used by nearly every business that holds sway over our cultural imagery, from small blogs to big corporations and from news organizations to advertisers, changing our ubiquitous visual representations of working women could have a ripple effect on society. That, at least, is the rationale behind the initiative.
"So much of what Lean In is trying to do is re-envision the way we look at women in the media," Pamela Grossman, who led this project at Getty, told The Post. "The power of pictures is gargantuan."
She also added that "women" is the most frequently searched term in Getty's database, in part because industries like finance are increasingly looking to license such images for corporate use as their workforce diversifies.
In an interview with the New York Times, Sandberg said: “When we see images of women and girls and men, they often fall into the stereotypes that we’re trying to overcome, and you can’t be what you can’t see.”
Granted, stock images are always going to fall short of reality. But if a picture is worth a thousand words, it is worth thinking about the story that each image tells.
Take a look through some of the images here: