Stock

“Woman laughing alone with salad”: humorous and ironic feminist dialogue with stock photography. In her job as an instruction designer, Jennifer Bowering Delisle regularly sourced stock photography and became fascinated by these images’ distinct aesthetic: their unusual camera angles, pronounced colour filtering, and heavy-handed and often bizarre visual metaphors. She set off to give voice to the silent women that recur in these images, and to enter into dialogue with them. As a low-cost source of millions of images, stock databases provide a significant number of the images used in advertising, publishing, and other media. This ubiquity means that stock’s contrived poses and distinct look are instantly familiar – and reinforce and shape biases, privilege, and stereotypes. From found poems using metadata and keywords, to riffs on stock image database search results with titles like “Good Mother Morning Family Happy,” “Beautiful Woman Eating Salad,” and “Lady Boss Smiles with Arms Folded,” Delisle’s ekphrastic poems take a playful look at stock photography’s clichés and delight in all of its strangeness.