Stock Photos Are Terrible at Depicting Illness, Mental or Physical

But this is by design, not unintentional. Even charities willingly participate in it coz apparently it's been shown that people will give more if they can "empathise" or are at the very least not disgusted by images. The truth simply wouldn't raise as much money, at least in the opinion of those commissioning such things.

I don't like it, I think it's dishonest, but dishonesty seems to be the way things work these days.

 

Hi all! If you posted, ‘liked’ or read comments on this thread, I hope you might be interested in spending just a few minutes helping out with an important, related project here on the forum – namely, to get the media to use better images of PwME in their news articles.

A large group of us have been working together on another thread to choose a pool of suitable photos in the Getty Images stock library, which media editors already use to find photos. We want to suggest to our charities that they include a link to that pool with every press release that they send out, and encourage photo editors to use it.

But we need your help to show that meaningful numbers of PwME and our carers support the pool! We’re therefore aiming for at least 50, and preferably 100 votes on the photo-pool in this poll.

So if you haven’t done so already, please read Simon M’s explanatory post (the first in that thread) and then do the poll.

Huge thanks!

 

Thanks very much to everyone who has voted on the poll so far! We’ll be closing it on January 3rd.

And just a reminder – if discussing individual photos, please don’t post any copies or screenshots of pictures from Getty Images – it’s against their copyright terms and they’re known to use software that crawls the web looking for rogue copies of their images, so it’s best not to.

Thanks again, and happy holidays!

(With apologies for cross-posting.)

 

Poll closed, 90% in favour of the Getty Images collection put together by PwME

Thank you to everyone who voted in the poll! It's now closed.

Please go to this other thread to see plans for getting the collection out where it can help.