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Pam Grossman is using stock photography to change the way the world sees women.
Grossman is a director of visual trends at Getty Images, the stock photo agency that supplies images not only for newspapers, magazines, and websites, but also a world of billboards, advertisements, and corporate marketing materials. Over the years, so many of the stock photos that litter of our everyday lives have portrayed women in unrealistic, unflattering, and sometimes demeaning ways, but Grossman recently teamed with LeanIn.org -- the feminist non-profit created by Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg -- to create a new collection of stock photos that aims to show women as they really are.
"These women really feel like the protagonist of their own story," Grossman says. "They're doing something. They're engaged. They don't feel like they're posing for our benefit. They feel like they have dynamism and are comfortable in their own in skin."
Over the past week, the collection -- curated from Getty's vast photo archive -- has received an enormous amount of attention across the media, Twitter, and beyond, and that's only to be expected. Known as the "Lean In Collection," it's wonderfully powerful in its sheer simplicity. Some of the images still fall short in their portrayal of women -- putting a scientist in gaudy amounts of makeup or posing a businesswoman in unnatural ways -- but in some respects, this only adds to the impact of the collection. It shows the problems with the way women have long been portrayed in stock photos -- and the problems with stock photos in general. The fact of the matter is that stock photos so often make men look silly too. It's the nature of the beast.
Down With The Airbrushed Superwoman
This past fall, a New York magazine website called The Cut did a wonderful job of shining a light on these problems, compiling a gallery of images it called "Feminism According to Stock Photography." Clearly, these photos were meant to boost the portrayal of women, but they end up doing much the opposite. They're cheesy (a woman in boxing gloves), insulting (a giant women crushes a frightened man under her high heel), ridiculously sexual (a woman in a racy top exposing her ample cleavage while holding a drill), and downright bizarre (a woman with six arms tries to "have it all").
Grossman also complains that so many stock photos show off a kind of airbrushed superwomen who don't exist in the real world. "This idea of a woman who has to be perfectly composed and looks totally flawless all the time -- everyone is just getting sick of it," she says.
But she's hoping to push the world in a new direction through her Lean-In collection. Grossman first had the idea this past summer. Sandberg's book, Lean In had just come out, spreading a very corporate approach to feminism. Crammed with real pictures of people in real situations, Facebook and other social networks were changing the way the world sees women. And she decided that Getty should help push the trend forward.
"A lot of people don't realize they're surrounded by Getty Images all the time when they're out in the world. that's why we believe we can have such a wide-reaching impact," she says. "Our clients are every big advertising agency you can imagine, and virtually all of the biggest corporations. We're this secret weapon in a lot of creative back pockets."
Getty is no Facebook, but in the world of professional photography, the company's database is one of the most widely used, offering over 150 million images. And over the past few years, Grossman says, the most popular term on the Getty search engine -- the term typed most often by people who build ads and illustrate magazine stores -- has been "women," followed closely by "business" and "family."
Grossman was interested in curating a collection of pictures that could satisfy those searches without contributing to the often ridiculous way that women are portrayed in ads and magazines. She wanted to provide images that closely resemble the lives of real, active women -- to avoid tired stereotypes and impossible fantasies. "In an image, is the woman talking in the meeting or passively listening?" Grossman says. "Little, subtle visual cues like that are really important, and we were really very granular about those kinds of image details."
Leaning In
As a Getty director of visual trends, Grossman is part of the team that "gets images on the site before clients know they need them," so she was an ideal person to change the way the company delivered images of women. But in order to focus as much attention as possible on the project, she went outside the company.
She put together a 45-minute presentation and showed it to LeanIn.org, hoping to enlist the foundation's help. Her aim was to show the non-profit that the world is reaching a "flash point," entering a fourth wave of feminism, and this is largely driven by a new kind of imagery. In movies and television, images of women like Girls' creator, star, and writer Lena Dunham and Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Lawrence are part of this, showing us a "much more authentic type of woman," a woman who "looks like someone you know," and Grossman argued that stock photos could help drive this change even further.
Getty and LeanIn.org eventually reached an agreement that will see the stock photo company give the foundation a portion of the licensing fees pulled in by the new collection, and LeanIn is helping to curate the images in the collection, which now spans more than 2,500 pictures. Getty will also offer two women-focused photography grants totaling $30,000.
Beyond Pictures
For Grossman, the ultimate aim is to change the images we see every day on billboards, in stop windows, across the pages of glossy magazines, atop airport kiosks -- everywhere, really. Her biggest hope is that the beauty, pharmaceutical, and financial industries join the shift towards a more realistic portrayal of women.
As you can see from the photos above, Grossman is pushing us in the right direction, but there's still some work to do. Though the new collection does a pretty good job of thoughtfully and naturally portraying in the business world, it's still hard to find good images that show women in worlds of science, technology and mathematics. Other critics say the next wave of feminism needs to focus on issues much larger than the portrayal of women in stock photos, but Grossman says she and her company are just playing their part in what should rightly be a much broader effort.
"We all have a responsibility to use whatever tools we have at our disposal to help make the world a better place," she says. "Do we think this is the only way to solve the complicated issues about making women and girls more equal? Of course not. There are so many different things that need to happen. But this is what we have the power to do right now."
