Why We Don't Use Stock Photos

Stock photography has a grammar. You learn to read it immediately: the person at a desk, looking thoughtfully toward a window; the hands around a coffee cup; the aerial view of a city at golden hour. These images are not bad. They are competent. They fill space, they do not offend, and they have been optimised — through millions of searches and downloads — to correspond to the broadest possible range of editorial contexts.

That optimisation is the problem. An image designed to work everywhere works nowhere in particular. It is the visual equivalent of a phrase that has been used so many times it no longer means anything. It occupies space without adding information. And in a publication where every decision is supposed to be intentional, the stock photo is the loudest possible signal that a decision was not made.

What Images Are For

An image in an editorial context is not decoration. It is an argument. It says: here is a way of seeing the thing I am writing about. It takes a visual position — on the light, on the frame, on the subject — that either supports the writing or contradicts it. A good editorial image is in dialogue with the text. A stock image is a gap filler.

The alternative is not necessarily original photography — though that is what we use when we can. The alternative is the conscious choice: the image that was chosen for a specific reason, for this specific piece, rather than because it appeared when you searched the subject in a licensing library.

The Practice of Visual Selection

For essays that carry images on Augustra, we start with the question: what does this essay see? Not what is it about — what does it see? Every piece of writing has a visual logic, even if no images are present. It has an angle of approach, a quality of light, a relationship between foreground and background. Finding an image for it is an act of translation: taking the visual logic of the prose and finding its equivalent in a photograph.

Sometimes we find nothing adequate and publish without. Field Notes carry no images by design. Some essays are better served by typography alone. The absence of an image is a valid choice. The presence of a wrong one is not.

This is a constraint, and constraints are generative. Having decided not to use stock photography, we have been forced to develop a more considered relationship with the visual layer of the site. The images that do appear here have earned their place — which is, as it turns out, the same standard we apply to everything else.