Get The Picture
A recent post at Design Observer (guess what the blog is about) by Jesse Nivens struck a chord with me. Nivens laments the lack of "normal" photos of fat people in stock photo libraries.
I can back this up through my own experience; whenever I wanted photos of average, typical people I could almost never find any people near average - everyone was thin and/or buff.
...the use of these images, if you can find them, is relegated to niche issues: you use a picture of an overweight person only if you're talking about, say, poor fitness, and that's it. It is similar to years past when someone in a racial majority might only use the picture of a person in a minority group when dealing with a "minority issue," instead of including pictures like these on a day to day basis, as most of us try to do now. But interestingly, these days this "advertising discrimination" has been reversed: designers and photographers, the majority of whom are overweight, just like everyone else, are avoiding the majority.
Great post to see, particularly from someone not involved in the movement.
Leonard Nimoy in the NY Times | Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition
Posted by paul on May 16, 2007
Somebody ought to ask Sandy Szwarc where she gets her photos for her blog, because she has really nice, flattering photos of children and adults of all sizes.
Interesting article. What was cool was that after I read some of the comments, I went to gettyimages.com to search 'overweight' for myself and see what's out there. Of course I found several pictures of fat people eating but I also found some very sexy, provocative, empowering, sometimes even naked (!) pictures of fat men and women. I'm going to save the ones I like to a folder on my desktop so I can look at it every time I feel like crap about myself. It's like a little popular media antidote
I rely a lot on clipart.com for my job and is there ever a sad lack of diversity available, not only with size but with age also. I have a hard time finding decent clipart/photo objects even of people over 50. If I search there by "overweight" I get some hideous images. If I search by "fat" I get a lot of photos of doughnuts!!!
I have often lamented having to use the assortment of young pencil thin models they offer in their clipart. ...many times I wanted to morph them into fatter people but usually don't have enough time.
It sounds like there may be a special niche out there for clip art, etc. of normal "overweight" people. There have to be graphic designers and photographers who are in this catagory who might want to step up to the plate and take care of it, making inages that aren't making fun of people, ie. the food eating clip art, but real life clip art like they have for the rest of the world. Any takers?
This is a topic that is close to my heart, as a graphic designer & web developer.
I have actually been giving it some serious thought when it comes to not perpetuating beauty myths - and I have been thinking about my own "no stick thin models" policy when it comes to stock photography. Size is just one part of the picture, and I would be loathe to dismiss a photo just because someone is thin (and i am talking bones protruding thin, NOT healthy & thin - i do believe there is a difference), but to also encourage people, as a designer, to redefine "beauty" in the process.
It is a big task, but the design community can certainly take some responsibility. After all, we are the ones that pay for stock photography.
In fact, I think this deserves a blog post of its own on my blog.
As a graphic designer as well, one of the main issues is the fact that all of the content on sites like gettyimages, istockphoto, wireimages, and others are supplied by individuals not the people running the site. Its for profit and sadly a majority of people want thin stereotypically pretty people. I've had a hell of a time trying to find pictures for some school projects and ended up just taking pictures of myself. The people that take pictures of heavier models normally do it for art purposes thus they are not placed onto stock photo websites.
There's a pharmacy near where I work that has these huge display windows on the outside, four of them, with a various health topic on each - represented by a 10X life-size head-and-shoulders shot of a person and some text. I'm quite sure the pictures are stock as I don't think they would fork out for a separate photo shoot of that quality. The one about "diet and nutrition" (AKA weight loss) is a very, very cute fat woman smiling. I'm sure I've seen her modelling for some plus-size boutique catalogues. I often wonder if she'd be appalled that she's being used to promote dieting - especially since the diet this pharmacy flogs is "UltraLite", one of those godawful shake-based very low calorie things.