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Visual Communication
DOI: 10.1177/1470357204045785
2004; 3; 316Visual Communication
David Machin
Corporate Media
Building the World’s Visual Language: The Increasing Global Importance of Image Banks in
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A R T I C L E
Building the world’s visual language: the
increasing global importance of image
banks in corporate media
D A V I D M A C H I N
Cardiff University
A B S T R A C T
Many of the images we now find in magazines, news, promotional material
and advertisements are bought cheaply from image banks like Getty
Images, which can be accessed by people all around the world. These
images are technically of high quality. They have bright lighting and flat
colours; attractive models are highly posed and are set in non-descript
locations to make them usable across the world. They do not represent
actual places or events and they do not document or bear witness, but
they symbolically represent marketable concepts and moods such as
‘contentment’ and ‘freedom’. The world in magazines and other similar
media therefore comes to resemble the limited world of the image bank
categories, which are based on marketing categories. This is therefore an
ideologically pre-structured world which is in harmony with consumerism.
K E Y W O R D S
discourse analysis • electronic images • image banks • multi-media •
multi-modality • photography • semiotics
I N T R O D U C T I O N
You are reading through the pages of a Sunday newspaper supplement. There
is an article on the effect of moving home on children. On the page is a photo
of a child with a cuddly toy, looking rather thoughtful, its gaze slightly off
frame. The child sits on what looks like steps in front of a blank background,
and is positioned to the side of the frame, to enhance the sense of space and
loneliness. The image is technically superb, highly posed and highly
designed, with careful co-ordination between the rich, primary colours of the
clothes, the toy and the background.
The next article in the supplement looks at inner city violence in the
Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi:
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Vol 3(3): 316–336 [1470-3572(200410)3:3; 316–336]
v i s u a l c o m m u n i c a t i o n
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1950s. It is illustrated by a black and white photograph of Teddy Boys in
confrontational mode. They stand in a row facing the right of the frame, as if
confronting an unseen rival, but in an orderly way, so all can be seen by the
camera. A second glance reveals that the shot is likely to be a still from a movie.
Neither of these images has been commissioned for these specific
articles. They have been taken cheaply and conveniently from an image bank.
Image banks like Getty Images and its main rival, Bill Gates’s Corbis, stock
many millions of images, which can raise revenue of up to $100,000 each a
year as they are licensed to designers around the planet. Many of them are
archival images of key historical moments. But the biggest earners are stock
images like that of the child sitting alone on the steps – images that do not
record anything but evoke an idea or a feeling and can be used to add interest
to a page. This is a $2 billion a year industry, and one which has entirely
transformed the world of media images. Previously, image collections
formed a small fragmented, national, specialist industry. Then Getty came
along, buying up smaller collections and digitalizing everything, thus
creating a global, cheap and fast access system. This article argues that this is
bringing about fundamental changes in the way photographic images are
used. What matters now is no longer only what photographs represent, when
and where they were taken, and why. What matters now as much, or more, is
how many different contexts they can be inserted into, both in terms of what
they represent and in terms of their form, as they must be able to fit into a
range of overall layout designs, for instance through colour coordination.
The more they are multi-purpose, generic and decorative, the better they will
sell. There has been a shift, it is suggested, from emphasis on photography as
witness to photography as a symbolic system. This is partly due, I argue, to
the culture of branding, where products are represented by images of, say,
friendship, romance, or adventure – in other words through the meanings
and the values of the products rather than through the products themselves,
or their functions and uses. I do not wish to suggest that the use of symbolic
images is fundamentally wrong, only that it should not become so dominant
as to squash other roles which photography can and should also play.
The main purpose in this article is to describe the Getty image bank
as a symbolic system. It is important to stress, however, that symbolic systems
of this kind do not simply evolve. They are actively and intentionally created
by powerful global corporations, and the way in which they are created is
driven by the needs and interests of these corporations. For this reason, I
begin by sketching the political and economic context in which this ‘visual
language’ developed. This article formed part of a wider project on the
representations of women in global media, such as Hearst’s Cosmopolitan with
44 versions around the world. So this article investigates representations of
women in the image bank. This does not provide a complete analysis of the
Getty image bank but it serves as a representative example of the way that
particular kinds of actors, actions, settings, moods, etc. tend to be seen around
the world due to the image bank. These images, I argue, in reflecting consumer
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categories, show a stylized, harmonized corporate world of work, commodified
leisure and individualism, which is abstracted from politics and society.
T h e i m a g e i n d u s t r y a n d G e t t y i m a g e s 1
In March 1995, Getty Communications, set up by investment bankers Mark
Getty and Jonathan Klein, saw potential in a fragmented world image
market. It made its first acquisition by buying the London-based Tony Stone
Images. At the time this was one of the world’s leading image agencies. Getty
has since gone on to take over 20 more companies, spending about $1 billion
on the way. The company went public on the Nasdaq in 1996.
In 1998, Getty moved into digital imaging with the purchase of
PhotoDisc. This revolutionized the use of image banks. When Getty first
acquired Stone, image banking meant filing cabinets full of negatives. In the
old style catalogue system of image access, designers would have to search
through catalogues to find the right image and then wait for the order to
arrive. Or they could contact the image bank to describe what it was they
wanted. A photo researcher would then do a search to find something that
fitted the request. If successful, some samples would be sent by courier, or by
mail. If the designer did not like the images, the whole process would have to
be repeated. With the Getty digital online service, the same thing could be
done quickly and cheaply. The industry’s main costs – storage and
distribution – were eliminated.
In 1999, Getty bought out Eastman Kodak’s image bank stock for
$183 million. In 2000, it spent $220 million on buying the Visual
Communications Group, with its $90 million a year in revenue and its hold
on European markets. This included what until then, with a collection of 10
million images, was the biggest commercial library of images and film clips
in the world (Reuters). In addition, Getty licenses the National Geographic
image collection, which contains over 10 million images. It now has about a
quarter of the world’s $2 billion a year industry – an industry which used to
consist of hundreds of small-scale regional and specialist companies. With
their superior technological and financial clout, and of course economy of
scale, Getty boasts, there is no reason why they should not be able to move
further into the territory of the remaining smaller operators. In some
countries, their current 25 percent market share would be considered illegal.
But the company is based in the US where Microsoft have already paved the
way, and at the global level there is no regulation for companies
monopolizing the world market in this way.
The key to Getty’s success is a system that allows designers to simply
type in search terms such as ‘woman’ and ‘work’ or, as Getty describes them,
‘conceptual terms’ like ‘freedom’ or ‘independence’. The search will then take
in some 350,000 images. They are mainly contemporary images but will also
include some archival images. This will throw up pages of thumbnails of
images associated with the search terms. Designers can then download the
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images to find one that fits in with their design, and pay online for the rights
to use it. The whole process can be completed in a few minutes.
While Getty is a North American company based in Seattle, over 40
percent of its revenue comes from outside North America, where it draws
customers from more than 50 countries. The company has websites in 10
languages and wholly owned offices and agents in more than 50 countries,
including Singapore, the Philippines, Korea, China, Lebanon, New Zealand,
Russia, United Arab Emirates, Europe and Latin America. Their images can
increasingly be found all around the planet in advertisements, magazines,
promotional material, food packaging, newspapers, etc.
The other massive image bank is Bill Gates’s Corbis which has about
two million images online. However, Corbis deals mainly in news and
archival images, while Getty focuses on licensing stock photography to
designers and advertisers. Jonathan Klein, one of the founding directors, has
said that old pictures do not bring in the same kind of money as stock
photography, e.g. images of business meetings, skylines, or romantic couples.
Initially, Getty did not produce images but used the agencies that had
increasingly emerged to take advantage of the many images photographers
do not use. More recently, however, Getty has started to actively search out
images, informing photographers of the kinds of images they look for. Getty
images, according to Morrish (2001), must be ‘striking, technically superb,
yet meaningless’, so that they will ‘never conflict with the client’s message’. As
I argue later, I do not in fact agree that this is the best way to describe the
typical Getty image.
Getty’s promotional material reveals that the company ‘is a leading
force in building the world’s visual language, through its innovative creation,
sourcing and distribution of imagery, fonts and related services to the
communications industry worldwide’. The company claims to produce and
distribute images that touch people every day all over the world. If it does
indeed have this kind of global reach, and this kind of influence on the
images photographers now produce – and there is every indication that it
does – we should take their claim seriously: Getty is a leading force in building
the world’s visual language from one which emphasized the photograph as
witness, as record of reality, to one which emphasizes photography as a
symbolic system and the photograph as an element of layout design, rather
than as an image which can stand on its own. These changes in visual
language are driven by the needs of global corporations, more specifically by
the requirements of the concept of ‘branding’, as I show later in more detail.
I now turn to an analysis of the Getty images of women by focusing
on three aspects: (i) their genericity, (ii) their ‘timelessness’, and (iii) their low
modality. This is followed by a discussion of the system of search words used
in the Getty image bank. As I draw on a range of analytical concepts and
methodological tools, it is more convenient to discuss these in the relevant
sections, rather than in a separate methodology section. I would like to stress
that this study is a first exploration. The sheer size of the Getty image bank
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Main point
makes it complex to grasp the hidden system in all its detail, and computer
corpus techniques are currently being developed that will help us to obtain a
more comprehensive picture. However, I do feel that, in this article, I have
been able to put out a few useful markers on the terrain.
T H E G E N E R I C I M A G E
Photographers I interviewed told me that images produced for Getty need to
be general rather than specific. The image of the child with the cuddly toy is
an example. It can be used to illustrate childhood worries and traumas of
many kinds and in many contexts. In this section, I explore just what it is that
can make photographic images generic. And it should perhaps be
remembered that until recently many key theorists of film and photography
have argued that photographic images can never be generic. Contrasting
photographic images with words, Metz (1971) listed five key differences. One
of them was that images can never be generic, while words are always generic
and can only become specific in a given context: ‘The image of a house can
never mean “house” but only ever “Here is a house”’ (p. 118).
Decontextualization
A key characteristic of the vast majority of Getty images is that the
background is either out of focus, or eliminated altogether – many of the
images are made in the studio, against a flat background. By means of such
decontextualization a photograph is more easily inserted into different
contexts, and acquires a ‘conceptual’ feel. According to Kress and Van
Leeuwen (1996), ‘by being decontextualised, shown in a void, represented
participants become generic, a “typical example”, rather than particular, and
connected with a particular location and a specific moment in time’ (p. 165).
As a result, they say, decontextualization is one of the hallmarks of the
‘abstract coding orientation’, an approach to image production in which the
validity of images lies not in their resemblance to visible reality, but in their
adequacy with respect to the essential or general nature of the things
depicted, and this means ‘reducing the individual to the general, and the
concrete to its essential qualities’ (p. 170). I return to this later under the
heading of ‘modality’.
Generic settings
If a setting is shown, it tends to be either a window, or a generic setting.
Windows are favourites, especially when the view behind the window is light
and out of focus, because they suffuse the image with a feeling of brightness
and airiness. I interviewed over 30 photographers who had syndicated their
work for this project who universally said that this provided ‘optimism’,
‘delicacy’ and ‘beauty’. Clearly, the world of the image bank image is the
bright and happy world of ‘positive thinking’ favoured by contemporary
corporate ideology.
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If other settings are shown, they tend to be generic. Generic interiors
avoid clutter. Their style is the style of the showroom or the interior in the
home decoration magazine, which must allow as many people as possible to
imagine the space as their own. Often there is a sense of opulence, as in the
airport lounge, or the modern designer shoe shop, or restaurant or media
office in New York or London: expansive wooden floors, bright modern
lighting, minimalist furniture highlighting perhaps one single, exciting
colour. Exteriors also tend to be generic: mountains, the ocean, a nondescript
city street that might be anywhere in the world.
Figures 1, 2, 3 and 4 illustrate these features. All of them show
ambiguous spaces. Two of them have the typical high lighting key. Figure 1 is
coded by Getty as being an ‘office space’, yet it might also be a large studio
space. Figure 2 is categorized as ‘construction’ but, apart from the hard hat,
not much construction is visible. Figure 3 is categorized as ‘research’, although
it could be an office space, apart from the fact that the model is wearing a lab
coat. Figure 4 is coded as being an ‘architect’ yet the space itself resembles a
museum space, an artist’s studio or some other kind of corporate space. It is
only the presence of a standing drawing board that indicates architecture.
M a c h i n : B u i l d i n g t h e w o r l d ’ s v i s u a l l a n g u a g e 321
Figure 1 ‘Office space’. © Getty Images: Businesswoman using a laptop with her
colleague on a mobile phone, dv 689054 (RF), Digital Vision collection.
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Attributes
Figures 1, 2, 3 and 4 also illustrate the importance of props for the generic
image. Props are used to connote not only the setting but also the identities
of the actors and the nature of activities, but in terms of ‘types’ rather than
individual identities. An image might be categorized as ‘research, science and
technology’ such as in Figure 3, showing a woman in a white coat, wearing
glasses, working at a computer. Take away the white coat, and the woman
might as well be a businesswoman. In Figure 1, it is the computer and
telephone that signify ‘office’. Since these two attributes are so unspecific, a
wide range of work settings can be signified by this image, allowing it to be
used in a range of articles. Again, Figure 2 is categorized as ‘construction’, but
the only visual indicator of this is the hard hat.
V i s u a l C o m m u n i c a t i o n 3 ( 3 )322
Figure 2 ‘Construction’. © Getty Images: Architect with hard hat and blueprints in hand.
dv272101 (RF), Digital Vision collection.
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Barthes (1977) has said that the objects in photographs form a ‘code
of connotation’:
They constitute excellent elements of signification: on the one hand
they are discontinuous and complete in themselves, a physical qualification
for a sign, while on the other they refer to clear, familiar signifieds.
They are thus the elements of a veritable lexicon, stable to a degree
which allows them to be readily constituted into syntax. (pp. 22–3)
To my knowledge, the implicit challenge to try and construct such a lexicon
has not been taken up in the academic study of photography. But, as I show
later, it has been taken up by Getty, whose code book provides precisely such
a lexicon and syntax.
Models as generic people
In fashion, the faces of the models are often striking. In stock images of
women, on the other hand, the models are clearly attractive but not
remarkable because a striking face, an easily recognizable face, would be less
easy to re-use. Not only casting, but also hair style, make-up and dress must
help create genericity or ‘categorization’, as it is called in Van Leeuwen (2000:
95), who argues that visual categorization is not an either/or matter, but
depends on the degree to which cultural attributes and physiognomic
stereotypes overwhelm or suppress people’s unique, individual features. In
Figures 1, 2 and 3, the models have become interchangeable. Their
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Figure 3
‘Research’.
© Getty Images:
Woman in lab
coat using
computer,
E003338 (RF),
Photodisc Blue
collection.
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individuality has been fully ‘appropriated’, as Barthes (1973: 118) would say,
by the type they are to represent. It is as if we are back in the era of medieval
art, where saints and mythological or biblical characters were recognized not
on the basis of their physiognomy but on the basis of their attributes (Jupiter
carrying the thunderbolt, St Catherine carrying the wheel) or on the basis of
their dress or hair style (e.g. St Peter was an old man with hair and beard cut
short and wearing a blue tunic and yellow cloak). In Figure 2, the model
becomes a construction worker because of an attribute. Take off the hard hat
and, with the addition of a drawing board, she could become an architect.
Give her a laptop and she is a businesswoman.
This use of a limited number of props leads to a highly clichéd
vocabulary. In the article from which I have already quoted, Metz (1971) also
said that, while there is a limited stock of words in a given language,
photographic images are infinite in number (p. 118). But when we look at
how the Getty image system represents a given category, for instance ‘people’
or ‘settings’, we find that it has a quite limited visual vocabulary. Science is
indexed by a white coat, construction by a hard hat, office work by a
computer and a telephone, and so on. This is particularly important in
relation to the representation of women – which happens to be the issue that
led to my interest in image banks. In the early 1970s, women began to be
represented in the mass media as
part of the corporate world. This
corporate world, particularly during
the 1980s, was mythologized
as a world of innovation, ideas,
groundbreaking cut-and-thrust
business moves. Advertising and
women’s magazines often used
images of women in formal suits
(usually with short skirts) with
either a mobile phone or a laptop
to index positions of power in
business and the corporate cityscape.
While the actual power of
the woman and the reality of the
world in which she operated was
never formulated, the props did
their work. In the Spanish television
version of Cosmopolitan,
there is a programme called Sextot
where presenters talk frankly about
sex, as in the magazine itself,
which uses sexual transgression as
one indication of women’s agency
(Caldas-Coulthard, 1996). In the
V i s u a l C o m m u n i c a t i o n 3 ( 3 )324
Figure 4
‘Architect’.
© Getty Images:
Architect and
drafting table,
dv267016e (RF),
Digital Vision
collection.
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opening sequence, the camera moves along a digitally generated street
towards the studio set. The street is urban, city high-rise. The camera lingers
on the people carrying out their lives silhouetted in the windows. Many of
them are women sitting at computers. In other words, the Cosmo viewer is
constructed as an empowered woman through the attributes of open
sexuality (which has its own history) and corporate technology. Earlier I
cited the words of one of Getty’s founders who said that his company would
have a defining role in the world’s visual language. We are beginning to get a
glimpse of the nature of this language.
To summarize this section: I have discussed three key aspects of
photographic genericity – decontextualization, the role of attributes, and the
use of generic models and settings – in an attempt to show that the
photographic image is not necessarily restricted to capturing specific and
unrepeatable moments. It can also be generic, denoting general classes or
types of people, places and things, rather than specific people, places and
things. Until recently, this kind of photography was restricted to fields like
advertising – and to some degree ‘art’ photography. Today it moves out of
these fields into territory that used to belong to photojournalism and
documentary photography – while paradoxically some advertising images go
the other way (e.g. Benetton).
Timelessness
Closely related is the fact that image bank images tend to lose their origin in
time and space. The past is reduced to a simple iconography, while the
present becomes a symbolic world with a fairly stable global vocabulary.
The Observer of 9 June 2002 carried a Getty image of a woman
wearing a headscarf and holding a child. The image was used to illustrate the
conflict in Kashmir which was highly newsworthy at the time – and it came
from the National Geographic collection which is incorporated in the Getty
image bank. As is typical of National Geographic images, it is highly stylized,
with rich, deep colours and an out of focus background. Here it is used to
give the reader a sense of the effect of the conflict on ordinary people. It has
been argued convincingly (Lutz and Collins, 1993) that National Geographic
offers a very Western view of the world, always emphasizing enduring human
conditions like motherhood and childhood, and using colourful clothes and
exotic settings to emphasize the diversity of humanity – at the expense of
truly revealing difference and political realities. National Geographic openly
discusses some of the techniques it uses to manipulate images, for example,
through the use of colour (Abramson, 1987; Bryan, 2001), yet here all this is
concealed, as the image is transformed from being a witness, a record of
moments in the world, to a symbolic representation of the vulnerability of
the mother and child in conflict. Again, there is in principle nothing wrong
with symbolic representations of this kind. We need both the abstract truth
of the symbolic representation and the empirical truth of the record. What is
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problematic is the confusion between the two that characterizes the current
period of transition from the hegemony of the one to the hegemony of the
other.
Jameson (1991) once described the effect that movies had on the
distorted and mythical representation of America in the 1950s, with its small
town diner, prom night, wearing of sneakers, people classified as nerds, etc. A
limited number of icons came to represent the whole of a particular time,
place and way of life. According to photographer Michael Wray (personal
communication), we will gradually come to accept stock images in this way,
as images that show us how the world really is. Professional photographers
will have no choice but to produce these kinds of images and no others. They
will receive a list of search categories from the image bank which they will
use as a guide. The images they produce may or may not have something of
their own signature. But a less distinguishable image which contains the
required generic features will have more chance of re-use than an image
which draws attention to itself. Wray suggested that even the ‘edgy’ looking
image has become a generic category. For a while, perhaps, denotation and
connotation held each other in balance. Now, it seems, we are moving to a
photography in which there is only connotation.
Modality
A further characteristic of image bank images is their modality. Image bank
images lack ‘denotative excess’. According to Barthes (1977), it is (but now,
perhaps, we need to say, ‘was’) typical of photographs that connotation can
never exhaust them, ‘there always remaining in the discourse a certain
denotation without which, precisely, the discourse would not be possible’
(p. 50). In other words, because photographs reproduce reality, they have an
‘ineffable richness’ of detail, an ‘analogical plenitude’ (p. 33) which guarantees
that the photograph, however much it is a message with a connoted cultural
meaning, also always contains a surplus of things that ‘are just there’, without
contributing anything to the cultural meaning, other than that they ‘naturalize’
it by being there. Exactly the same phenomenon takes place in fiction, where
certain realistic details,‘indices’, as Barthes (1977: 93) calls them, add nothing
to the storyline or its interpretation but serve only to heighten realism. In
image bank images, such realistic detail, such denotative excess, is eliminated.
Apparently, it is not needed any more. Apparently, signification can, today, be
more overt, and is no longer in need of naturalization. Indeed, indexes of
artifice, of un-reality, may be added, such as the emphasis on colour
coordination, which gives away that the images are designed rather than
‘captured’. In advertising images, such unreality was common already. The
difference is that, today, the corporate image and its ideology also pervade
the territory formerly held by the documentary photograph.
Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996: 161ff) have pointed out that
verisimilitude has never been the only criterion for the truth of images. In
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scientific images and abstract art, images must be truthful, not in the sense
that they look like what they represent, but in the sense that they correspond
to the underlying nature, or ‘essence’, of what they represent. This is why in
scientific illustrations a simplified diagram might be more accurate than a
highly detailed photograph. In such a context, a photograph may be seen as
showing only the surface, while diagrams can get underneath that surface by
representing the structures common to a range of superficially different
phenomena. Similarly, a sculpture of a woman by Miro represents not a
specific woman, but ‘woman’ in general (as Miro saw her). In such images, a
reduction in the use of the means of visual representation signifies higher
modality – a line drawing rather than a photograph, a blank background
rather than a specific landscape, black and white rather than colour, plain
colour rather than modulated colour, and so on. Another possible validity
criterion for images is their emotive resonance. Here what matters is neither
the truth of verisimilitude, nor the abstract, ‘essential’ truth, but emotive,
‘sensory’ truth. From the point of view of photographic realism, such
‘sensory’ images will be less realistic, but this time not because of a reduction,
but because of an increase in the use of the means of visual representation:
uncannily fine detail, richer colour, a deeper perspective. Think of Dali – or
of food advertisements. And artists may of course combine the abstract and
the sensory truth, for instance by using simplified forms but intensified
colours, as did Miro. The same appears to be happening now with image
bank images. They are, it seems, increasingly moving towards the abstract
truth and, at the same time, the sensory, emotive truth. In doing so, they are
also increasingly moving away from the naturalistic, empirical truth.
M E A N I N G P O T E N T I A L
Barthes (1977) said that, in the early 1960s, images were polysemous: ‘they
imply, underlying their signifiers, a “floating chain” of signifieds, the reader
able to choose some and ignore others’ (p. 39). Words, he said, are needed to
‘fix the floating chain of signifieds’ and ‘hold the connoted meanings from
proliferating’; in other words, to control the meaning of images by selecting
for them a single specific meaning. More recent theories have emphasized
how readers, rather than captions, anchor the meaning of images and,
indeed, verbal texts as well. The texts themselves embody a meaning potential
(Halliday, 1978), a set of possible meanings, and which of these meanings will
be actualized depends on the context – on who ‘reads’, where, when, and for
what reason. This is also the kind of reading image banks cater for. Image
bank images are not ‘anchored’ by a specific caption, but are categorized in
terms of a range of possible meanings, which are labelled by search words,
words being more easily managed in a computer than images. These search
words specify the kind of people, places and things shown in the image, and
sometimes also the period and the type of photograph. In addition, they
provide a connotative meaning potential, categorizing the images in
conceptual terms, as expressing ‘freedom’,‘romance’, and so on.
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The search terms play a key role in the visual language of Getty – and
they can also provide a framework for an investigation of it. They allow us to
ask not ‘What does this image mean?’, but ‘What, according to Getty, can (and
what cannot) be said with this image, and with the Getty visual language as a
whole?’ What will be said is then a different question that is currently being
investigated in relation to the representation of women and their sexual and
work activities in the 44 versions of the global women’s magazine
Cosmopolitan. In this article, however, I explore the structure of a visual
language, not the structure of its contextually specific uses (advertisements,
magazine features, corporate websites, etc.). Here, for example, is the
meaning potential of Figure 1:
Open plan, bending, computer equipment, one woman only,
businesswoman, office equipment, telephone, full length, profile,
office, Caucasian, one person, working, desk, one young woman only,
casual, 25–30 years, using computer, laptop, business person, side
view, indoors, day, business, agility, office equipment, flexibility,
horizontal, photography, balance, uniqueness, colour, individuality.
What I want to explore here is not these descriptions themselves, but the
structure that underlies them, the structure of the Getty semantic field (cf.,
eg., Lehrer, 1974). I use lexical structure analysis to investigate whether the
Getty language is indeed a systematic organization of a semantic field and, if
so, what that field is, and how Getty organizes it. Given the size of the image
bank, this is a very large task. Here I explore just two issues, which hopefully
will demonstrate the usefulness of this approach. First, I look at the field of
settings. Globalization is often referred to as ‘deterritorialization’. Looking at
the kinds of settings included in the image bank’s descriptions might help us
understand how deterritorialization is actually realized in visual communication.
Second, I look at the ‘conceptual themes’ field.
Settings: geographic search terms
There were a total of 90 ‘setting’ descriptors in the Getty image bank, which
could be initially categorized in terms of three broad categories: geography,
interiors and exteriors. Here are some observations.
Given the emphasis on generic images, it is perhaps not surprising
that specific places are not only relatively under-represented, but also form a
highly unsystematic and incomplete list. Most important, I found that while
most major world cities form search categories on the image bank, the
images that the terms throw up are mainly generic in that they could be
anywhere, or they are iconic, such as Mediterranean beaches, Latin American
indigenous people with highly coloured clothing, or Paris as indexed by the
Eiffel Tower, London as indexed by Big Ben, etc.
The following descriptions were given for parts of the world or
groups of countries: Europe, Mediterranean countries, Asia, Middle East,
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North America, Latin America, Caribbean, Oceania and the following list of
countries: Senegal, Cameroon, Bali, Indonesia, Denmark, Norway, Canada,
China, India, Jordan, Italy, Argentina, Guatemala, Spain, Greece and Russia.
It is clear that whoever designed the codebook did not assume that Getty’s
clients would be interested in looking for specific locations, and had no
particular interest in creating a systematic database in this regard. Precise
geographic location is haphazard, a leftover perhaps from the earlier days in
which place and data were the key authenticating data of any documentary
or news photograph. By and large, setting has become irrelevant, it seems –
with one exception, tourism. Not only are many of the places listed mainly of
interest from the point of view of tourism, but further investigation shows
that typing in such a place name will bring up places of touristic interest; for
instance, a search for ‘London’ will bring up Tower Bridge, Buckingham
Palace, and so on, as well as archive images of couples kissing and having fun
in London’s parks and streets, images which in all other respects have all the
hallmarks of the generic image.
It should also be noted that many of the images categorized in terms
of a particular location only carry generic indicators of that location.
Mediterranean countries, for instance, are represented by slightly out of
focus beach scenes, with a model posing. This applies to a range of
geographical locations. For example, an image might be categorized as
hailing from western Guatemala showing a mother carrying a baby, the baby
leaning back comically, the mother only indicated by ethnic colour and a
ponytail, and the background an empty sky. Clearly this image is not
intended to document anything about western Guatemala. It is included
because of the way it can connote Western notions of childhood. Other
specific geographic search terms yield equally generic images.
Generic settings
More common than geographic search terms are generic terms for interior
and exterior spaces. For example, rooms: gym, living room, conference room,
bedroom, office, school; types of buildings: swimming pool, temple, church,
railway station, subway, delicatessen, market, noodle bar, café, igloo; means of
transport: recreational boat, nautical vessel, passenger train, car; city exteriors:
urban scene, city location, street, alley, square, sidewalk, subway platform,
harbour, outdoor market, traffic jam; and country exteriors: rural scenes,
beach, sea, river, water’s edge, jetty, underwater, mountain range, field,
ploughed field, village, road. Some locations can be either in the city or the
country: backyard, fishing industry and running tracks.
The interior spaces included here are all represented in generic form,
as abstract spaces with a few props. Buildings, too, are unremarkable and
unmemorable, with little in the design denoting their function, except when
they are tourist attractions, as in the case of the igloo, when they feature in a
period image, as is the case particularly with railway stations, and in the case
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of markets, where produce is represented in detail and with high modality,
like the products in advertisements (cf. Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996: 164).
In the exteriors, we note the emphasis on water, which is used a great deal to
index freedom, relaxation and relationships. Water has a massive number of
images in the image bank, often using the diffused high key lighting that
characterizes the Getty image. Just as the mobile phone and the laptop index
work and business, so water indexes freedom, escapism and romance, as well
as freshness and health. We get a sense here of the way corporate visual
language incorporates ‘new age’ ideas. Connotations of serenity, escape and
freedom bring a sense of ‘philosophy’ or even morality into the corporate
world of branding and consumerism.
Finally, while the geographic terms form a haphazard collection, here
the beginning of systematicity can be felt. Some of the search terms clearly
have a hyponymic relation to others. There is, for instance, the distinction
between ‘indoors’ and ‘outdoors’, with the latter again divided into ‘urban
scenes’ and ‘rural scenes’, and with each allowing further subdivisions. This
has the makings of a systematic taxonomy, entirely along generic and global
lines, and entirely abstracting away from the specifics of specific places,
except in the case of tourism.
Conceptual themes
We found a total of 81 ‘conceptual’ search terms, and were able to categorize
them into two main categories: (a) mental states, and (b) themes expressing
core values associated with the people, places and activities shown. As I have
already suggested, it is these categories which are the true raison d’être of
stock images. As image bank contributor photographer Romilly Lockyer told
me, the most important thing about image bank images is that they evoke
moods and concepts. For this reason, it does not matter much that the image
of the Guatemalan child tells us little if anything at all about western
Guatemala. What matters is that it says something about childhood
innocence or cheekiness. The fact that it is also categorized as ‘western
Guatemala’ might help to tell the designer that the image is likely to have
some ethnic content (itself usually indexed in the image by patterned,
colourful clothing), which can be a useful corporate/consumer tool for
bringing a kind of morality to products.
We analysed category (b) conceptual search terms into five groups:
goals and motives; positive characteristics of people, places, things and/or
activities; negative characteristics of people, places, things and/or activities;
positive mental states; and negative mental states.
Goals and motives all express positive moral values. These include
social goals: togetherness, friendship, love, protection; a desire for knowledge
and progress: exploration, curiosity, innovation, growth, on the move; states of
mental and physical well-being: spirituality, balance, relaxation, satisfaction
and well-being; and some other less easily classifiable terms: freedom, fun,
world culture, patriotism and tradition.
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It is immediately obvious that we have here a well-organized and
systematic catalogue of the moral values of the new capitalism, values which
play a key role in the age of branding where product ranges are associated
with precisely these kind of values, so that companies no longer sell whisky
but friendship, no longer shampoo but hope, and so on.
A Getty image of a woman walking along the sea shore in a short
dress is categorized under ‘spirituality’ as well as under ‘calm people’. This is
once again realized through the presence of water and soft, high key lighting.
The model appears to be lost in the moment, but there is nevertheless a
horizon, a distant goal, in the shot.
Positive characteristics of people, places, things and activities are often
task-oriented: endurance, strength, agility, determination, concentration, but
they may also be aesthetic/moral, e.g. simplicity, purity, elegance, harmony,
grace, or focused on mental resources: creativity, learning, expertise, which
does not mean that vitality and sensuality are forgotten. Again we see values
here that fit in well with the new global corporate ideology, while the
negative characteristics included point at the possible risks of this ideology:
greed, vanity, pride, indulgence, escapism and aggression. Note how many
more positive terms there are: positive thinking is itself a crucial moral value
in the corporate/consumerist world.
Positive mental states for women include both affective states such as
pensive, shy, affectionate, cheerful, content, exhilarated and ecstatic, and cognitive
ones such as anticipation, memories, nostalgia and conflict, while negative
ones include disappointment, fear, loathing, fury, suspicion, hysteria, rejection.
The pictures that realize these categories focus on behaviours, which
are themselves quite systematically categorized. We see women in a range of
postures including sitting, standing, leaning and lying down, with a range of
facial expressions, such as looking at camera, staring, frowning, sulking,
watching and thinking, and involved in activities such as kicking and jumping.
We end this section with a look at some of the images that realize the
conceptual theme of ‘freedom’. Freedom has been, and still is, a key concept in
the history of Western thought, the basis of human rights, including the right
of freedom of expression. In the Getty visual language, it has a consistent
iconography. Figures 5 and 6 are representative of many hundreds of images
catalogued as expressing ‘freedom’.
The image in Figure 5 is clearly a stock image with all the hallmarks of
the generic image. There is no background apart from the blue sky – in
freedom images, blue skies are a must. The model is generic. With a pair of
glasses and a laptop she could be a businesswoman. The focus is not so much
on her as on the fact of her suspension mid-frame. Jumping, or the raising of
limbs generally (arms raised to heaven, legs raised on a bicycle), equals
freedom, which therefore is interpreted as a subjective experience, a sense of
freedom: the image is also categorized as expressing vitality and exhilaration,
both of which have many of the same indexes in the image bank.
In Figure 6, freedom is again expressed through bodily movement, as
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freedom to move – in none of the images is there any sense that freedom
might be about political belief or ideology. A woman is walking through
meadows, jumping, spinning, waving her arms. Again there are the blue
skies, and an open space – often an index of freedom, serenity, relaxation and
spirituality. Freedom is generally associated with the freedom to move, which
is indicated by many images showing people driving along a highway in
classic US sports cars, drawing on the road movie romance of get up and go.
In the Getty visual language, concepts like ‘freedom’ and ‘exhilaration’
are realized through activities which are in harmony with the corporate
world. Freedom is not ideological, not something that needs to be protected
or fought for. It is a mood, a passing feeling, expressed by jumping or other
physical activities, and a concept drawing on ‘new age’ ideas of serenity and
simplicity. An important part of the way branding works is by associating
a product or company with morally loaded values. As a result of this, there is
a market for the visual expression of such concepts, whereas there is less of a
market now for visuals that provide concrete and specific descriptions, the
visual of an earlier era of photography and of a time in which products were
sold on the basis of their use value.
V i s u a l C o m m u n i c a t i o n 3 ( 3 )332
Figure 5 ‘Freedom’. © Getty Images: Woman jumping, AA013794 (RF), Photodisc Green
collection.
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The semantics of the Getty visual language is a world of morality as
‘mood’, where freedom equals jumping and independence is a fashion
statement. The only other kinds of images categorized as expressing
‘freedom’ are an image of a US jet fighter and an image of the Statue of
Liberty, seen from below with war planes overhead. Needless to say,
‘capitalism’ is not a search term, and ‘globalization’ throws up romantic
images of global business. There is no category ‘welfare state’, and ‘poverty’ is
only reflected in black and white archive images, so that an article on poverty
has little choice but to use 1950s images in their layout, which effectively
helps create a cushion against the reality of poverty. Spanish Cosmopolitan
editor Sarah Glattstein Franco told me that image bank symbolic images, as
she called them, can ‘lift even the most depressing article’. By way of example,
she showed me an article on what happens in Spain when you need an
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Figure 6 ‘Freedom’. © Getty Images: Woman twirling in field, arms raised level with
shoulders, YLI_097 (RF), Photodisc Blue collection.
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abortion. Accompanying the text were two images, both generic image bank
images. They showed young models in underwear, against blank
backgrounds with high key lighting, looking thoughtful.
C o n c l u s i o n
Images of the kind discussed in this article are globally distributed and used.
As a result, visual language becomes demonstrably more homogenized,
generic and limited in its iconography. Will we still be able to recognize
‘work’ without the laptop, ‘freedom’ without someone jumping, ‘ethnicity’
without bright and multi-coloured clothing? Image banks like Eye-Wire,
incorporated into Getty, offer designer categories like ‘world family’ where
beautiful young, healthy people smile and leap about in multi-ethnic
colourful groups; ‘women on top’ where women in white-light diffused
abstracted rooms speak on telephones or laugh with other women while
pointing at computer screens; ‘young at heart’, where 60+’s cycle along
beaches or spray each other with garden hoses; ‘attitude’, where young
‘happening people’ in grunge fashion skateboard with shades in front of
fluorescent psychedelic backgrounds – in short, a world organized into
consumer categories and easy clichés.
Photographers and art directors told me that the role of the image has
changed. Photographs used to be much more descriptive. They would show
the viewer details of places, people and activities. Further information would
be given in the accompanying text. In contemporary publishing, there is a
tendency for the photograph to be used as part of the page layout alongside
fonts, colours and borders. Headings on texts may use the same colour as the
clothing or lips in the photograph. This will be true for ads, features and
fashion alike. The image will be used to symbolically represent the essential
message of the article, but this does not necessarily mean that the
photographic message is the same as that of the verbal text. A newly launched
Vietnamese women’s magazine contained an article on checking for mouth
cancer. It was illustrated with an image of the face of a young woman lightly
touching her lips, smiling excitedly, against a background suffused with white
light. For such an article, one might have expected a more serious image. But
this was a page for health promotions which contained several such abstract
image bank images. It had to symbolize health, beauty and the exhilaration
of life. And the images had to be colour coordinated with the rest of the
layout. As a result, the page looked very attractive. The world of consumer
health products is a very pleasant one. Even mouth cancer, showing the
magazine’s serious role, is lifted into controllability in this world. Glamour,
health, fun, energy, control and consumerism all become features of the same
landscape.
At first glance, the image bank seems to offer an unlimited vocabulary
with its several hundred thousand online images. Further exploration
quickly led me to realize its limitations. The image bank is an ideologically
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pre-structured world. The categories that are available are restricted in terms
of all the clichés and marketing categories I have begun to discuss in this
article. Phenomena which lie outside of this are not included. All this calls to
mind the processes which so concerned Adorno (1941, 1991) regarding the
culture industry. He was terrified by the way the culture industry, due to the
logic of economics and economies of scale, fostered homogenization, and
reproduced easily recognizable and easily digestible patterns. And he realized
the importance of predictability. He realized that the culture industry needs
predictability as it needs to predict the market, and that it can increase
predictability by presenting the audience with a preset conceptual space that
will allow them to recognize the product. All this in turn would remove the
possibility for creativity and innovation.
In our case, we have seen how image banks transform visual language
along the logic of economies of scale, and how the images that sell best
accord with existing consumer categories (‘world family’, ‘women on top’,
etc.), remove reality from the image to create a harmonized world, and
emphasize ‘moods’ rather than actions. Photographers, in order to survive,
will have to produce images that fit in with these categories. Even the ‘edgy’,
‘quirky’ image will have its own category. Such images may still be produced,
but if they are too memorable, they will not be multi-purpose enough and
lose out. We should be concerned about the effect of this increasingly stylized
and predictable world on audience expectations of what the visual
representation of the world should look like. We should be concerned about
the fact that we no longer flinch when we see a posed, processed, stylized,
colour-enhanced, National Geographic image of a woman and child taken
from Getty and placed on a page in The Guardian for a documentary feature
on the Kashmir conflict.
In Ethnographic Research for Media Studies (Machin, 2002), I argued
that we can think of society as a kind of conversation about the world and
about life. There have been many ways of doing this – a vast range of
conversations. The anthropological archive could be seen as a celebration of
this. Today’s mass media – and with it the Getty images – form a key part
of this conversation. It is clearly in the interest of the global corporations that
there should be one conversation only, with one shared language. Should we
commend Getty for uniting humanity in this way?
N O T E S
1. The information in this section comes from Getty publicity, The
Getty Website, interviews with photographer Allen Tannenbaum,
and Dorfman (2002).
R E F E R E N C E S
Abramson, H.S. (1987) National Geographic: Behind America’s Lens on the
World. New York: Crown.
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Adorno, T.W. (1941) ‘On Popular Music’, Studies in Philosophy and Social
Science IX(I).
Adorno, T.W. (1991) The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture.
London: Routledge.
Barthes, R. (1973) Mythologies. London: Fontana.
Barthes, R. (1977) Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana.
Bryan, C.D.B. (2001) The National Geographic Society: 100 Years of Adventure
and Discovery. New York: Abradale Press.
Caldas-Coulthard, C.R. (1996) ‘“Women Who Pay for Sex. And Enjoy It”:
Transgression versus Morality in Women’s Magazines’, in C.R. CaldasCoulthard
and M. Coulthard (eds) Texts and Practices: Readings in
Critical Discourse Analysis, pp. 250–70. London: Routledge.
Dorfman, J. (2002) ‘Digital Dangers: The New Forces that Threaten
Photojournalism’, Columbia Journalism Review July/Aug.
Halliday, M.A.K. (1978) Language as Social Semiotics. London: Edward
Arnold.
Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
London: Verso.
Kress, G. and Van Leeuwen, T. (1996) Reading Images – The Grammar of
Visual Design. London: Routledge.
Lehrer, A. (1974) Semantic Fields and Lexical Structure. Amsterdam: North
Holland.
Lutz, A. and Collins, J.L. (1993) Reading National Geographic. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Machin, D. (2002) Ethnographic Research for Media Studies. London: Arnold.
Metz, C. (1971) Essais sur la signification au cinéma, Vol. I. Paris: Klincksieck.
Morrish, J. (2001) Business 2.0, April edn, Bizjournals, Seattle.
Van Leeuwen, T. (2000) ‘Semiotics and Iconography’, in T. van Leeuwen and
C. Jewitt (eds) Handbook of Visual Analysis, pp. 92–118. London: Sage.
B I O G R A P H I C A L N O T E
DAVID MACHIN works in the Centre for Language and Communication at
Cardiff University.
Address: School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff
University, POB 94, Cardiff CF10 3XB, Wales. [email: machind@cf.af.uk]
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