Please join us for this free lecture inquiring how the stock images all around us shape our view of the world:

 

‘Stock images: questioning the ambient image environment that defines our visual world’
Giorgia Aiello (University of Leeds) 

Date: Wed 1 May 2019

Time 16:00 – 18:00 GMT

Location: King’s College London, King’s Building, Strand, WC2R 1ES

Room: Old Anatomy Lecture Theatre, K6.29 – 6^th floor, King’s building

Register: https://generic-images.eventbrite.co.uk/

 

The bulk of images that we encounter in everyday life are generic images from global image banks like Getty Images and Shutterstock. Nevertheless, pre-produced, ready-to-use stock images are most often overlooked rather than looked at. Whether it is because of its poor quality, extreme blandness, lack of veracity, or exploitative cheapness, stock imagery is frequently discounted as insignificant and rarely taken seriously. Yet, in spite of all current emphasis on user-generated imagery as a dominant mode of communication in contemporary visual culture, we quite literally swim in an ocean of images that were made for and are distributed by a handful of corporations. Following Paul Frosh’s groundbreaking work on pre-digital stock photography, I argue that stock images are not just the ‘wallpaper’ of consumer culture, but are also central to the ambient image environment that defines our visual world.

 

Bio: Giorgia Aiello (@giorgishka) is Associate Professor and Director of Research and Innovation in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. Giorgia’s work focuses on the politics and potentials of visual, multimodal, and material communication. Her book Visual Communication: Understanding Images in Media Culture (with Katy Parry) will be published by SAGE at the end of 2019.

 

This event is part of an ongoing seminar series on "critical inquiry with and about the digital" hosted by the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London.