Photo by Leah Newhouse from Pexels
Estimated reading time: 2-3 minutes
Fall 2024 Update: I’ve submitted this research to a journal and am waiting to hear if it will be published.
I’ve been working on a research project since fall term examining representations of “diversity” in stock photography (meaning images tagged with the keyword “diversity” on Shutterstock and Getty Images). This is a project that directly stems from questions I had/have as a professional communicator, and it resulted in me doing a serious reflection on my reasons, assumptions, and role as a white cisgender woman doing equity-related research.
I will be sharing my research publicly for the first time today as a poster at the University of Oregon 2024 Graduate Research Forum (fun fact: I made it this far in my academic/professional career without creating a poster). As academic conventions around sharing unpublished research remain strange to me, I will share a bit about my motivations for doing this research here.
1. How can I illustrate “Diversity”?
Despite regularly talking and writing about DEIA, I often struggle when posting online with what images to use alongside stories about equity issues (for example, it is why I used an image of Scrabble tiles when sharing my sample syllabus despite it being a fairly illogical representation). I also had this problem while working with many topics related to identity, and I know I am not alone. Admittedly, this is a question that misses (or encapsulates, to be honest) a lot about what is problematic about the way DEI communications is done, but it also is a practical concern for communicators that results in us making a lot of mistakes.
I don’t want my decisions to continue the tokenization and essentializing of identity. The common statement among communicators has become that we need to use “authentic imagery,” but what is that? (Changing where you look is a big part.) This question led me to examine stock photography after finding interesting examples of critical discussion. In a “that should have been obvious” moment, I quickly realized looking at stock photos was a particularly bad way to try to answer that, but it has created an opportunity for me to present to professional communication writing by Sara Ahmed and others about the problems of “happy diversity” and “language of diversity.”
2. No, random hands are not the answer.
While I came up with a more academic title (Keeping “community diversity” in stock: A critical social semiotic examination of representations of diversity in stock photography), I could have titled this paper “Stop showing me people’s hands already.” There are a variety of abstract symbols communicators use to illustrate the idea of diversity. While I know why we use them (see question 1), many are problematic. For example, many autistic individuals consider the commonly-used puzzle piece symbol “offensive and harmful.”
One popular practice I’m particularly tired of seeing is “diversity hands.”
We show pictures of people’s hands outstretched in the middle of a circle, holding globes, and high-fiving each other. We show hands reaching out to each other and fists raised in the air (note: this is not a criticism of Black- and minority-run or community/purpose-driven organizations that have every right to present these images). We show hands joining together to create the outline of a heart and laying flat on a table while lined up in order from darkest to lightest skin.
As abstract images, these photos seem to be the epitome of “difference is skin deep” and using people as props. In my mind, the use of these images screams that the DEI conversations happening within an organization are about optics/checkboxes rather than recognizing people/culture, acknowledging current and historical mistakes, and shifting power.
In other words, they seem like another particularly bad answer. So, please, really, stop showing me people’s disembodied hands.
P.S. Also, please be creative in your searches and go deeper than the first page when doing a search. I only collected 60 images for this project, but I’ve been amazed at how often I’ve seen the images used by organizations in DEI reports and elsewhere. As a practitioner, I am willing to say there are reasons to use stock photography rather than your own. However, we must be careful when selecting images. This is just as important as every other step in making a communication. Grabbing a stock photo from a database is easy. However, we need to remember their purpose is more than just filling a blank space. They are meant to build connection, not simply take up space.
Sandra Boone 
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