A Short Book on Stock Photography's Hidden History
Simona Supekar's Stock Photo, published by Bloomsbury, argues that the images nobody examines are now the training data behind generative systems.
Stock Photo by Simona Supekar appeared in 2026 in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series, and Eileen G'Sell reviewed it for Hyperallergic on 8 July. The book takes on a genre that is everywhere and studied almost nowhere, arguing that stock imagery quietly reproduces racial and gender hierarchies. Supekar notes that Getty Images significantly overrepresents light-skinned Indian subjects, and that searches for a Black businessman once returned pictures associating Black men with cocaine.
The sharper point concerns what happened next. Early digital image banks now supply much of the training data behind generative systems, so imbalances built cheaply and commercially in the 2000s are hardening into a technology's default aesthetic and default human. Supekar writes that such images act as ciphers that clue us in to ourselves, revealing what we value and what we do not. Stock photography is the least written part of photographic history and probably the most looked at.
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- Hyperallergic · 8 July 2026
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Illustrative image · Photo: Kish / Pexels — free licence
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