Romantic Images with Quotes Of Love For Facebook Timeline of Couples on Bed of Couples with Quote: Cheap Stock Images Romantic Images with Quotes Of Love For Facebook Timeline of Couples on Bed of Couples with Quote hd Of Hearts for Facebook of Couples of Kissing

Wednesday 26 March 2014

Cheap Stock Images Romantic Images with Quotes Of Love For Facebook Timeline of Couples on Bed of Couples with Quote hd Of Hearts for Facebook of Couples of Kissing

Cheap Stock Images Biography

source(google.com)

Consider this image. It’s clearly a turn-of-the-century studio portrait, but what else is it? To a stock photography agency, it could be an umbrella ad, a calendar illustration, or a costume designer’s reference. To one agency, it’s identified as:  

According to the original caption, it is also a Portrait of Otto Bettmann—About 2 Years of Age, With an Umbrella. 

Little Otto in his skirts could not have known that he would start collecting images as a teenager, earn a Ph.D. at twenty-five, begin compiling a picture history of civilization while curator of rare books in the Prussian State Art Library in Berlin, flee Nazism to the United States in 1935, and shortly thereafter found the Bettmann Archive, a major purveyor of stock photography. Nor did he know that sixty years after its founding, the Archive would be acquired by Microsoft’s Bill Gates for his Corbis image archive, shipped from lower Manhattan to a climate-controlled Pennsylvania mountain for preservation and digitization, and then redistributed over the Internet, where little Otto can be found today, exactly a century after the photographer snapped the shutter.  

Stock photography plays a role in all contemporary media, from print to cinema to television, from the analogue to the digital (including computer games). It appears in news and entertainment media, and in commercial, literary, and scholarly publishing. It’s also intertwined with art photography, because artists both produce and use stock imagery. In the categorizing spirit of the industry, let’s define stock as the commercially motivated creation, collection, organization, and/or dissemination of professional but anonymous or corporatized images. Stock increasingly includes photojournalistic, moving-image, art historical, and fully computer-generated work—and even audio clips. One need only start reading photo credits to discover stock’s pervasiveness. No credit? That’s often stock too, at several removes from its origin. Like émigré Otto. 

Pervasive but uncredited—this is also the place of stock in the history of photography. Yet, through its visual power and ubiquity, stock photography has played an important, if unwitting, role in promulgating new assumptions (or anxieties) about media in general and photography in particular. Over the past hundred years, stock’s consumers—we, the media-literate public—have come to terms with concepts that are as fundamental to the stock industry as to theories of the postmodern image. Specifically: photographs have no “essential” meaning or inherent truth; commerce, journalism, and art are deeply interrelated; authorship is fluid; and imagery of the past is integral to image-making in the present and future. Bettmann’s baby picture is a good example. The multiple categories defining his portrait demonstrate stock agencies’ understanding that images carry meaning far beyond the photographer’s intention and any inherent photographic truth. For example, nothing in this image itself denotes Jewish, which, like Whites, functions in the typological list more as a fraught social designation than as a visual cue. To contemporary eyes, moreover, the image could as easily be filed under Girls as Boys, while only in retrospect do the terms Prominent Persons and Archivist apply. German and American, similarly, may account for Bettmann’s émigré experience, but are hardly legible in the image. Yet, oddly, in listing all this detail, no descriptor fixes the picture in its era. To the stock industry, images are timeless because they are mutable. 