This is a photo of my mom and dad laughing.

Any time I do a more traditional portraiture shoot and end up with a batch of photos that look vaguely like they could have come with the frame, my mind starts turning and I start thinking about the world of stock photography.

As I’ve mentioned before, I BUY A LOT OF PICTURE FRAMES, so I am quite regularly confronted with the unavoidable photography that comes with them. Who are these people? They are never credited. Who is the photographer? He or she is never credited either. And sometimes the photography is quite good! Sometimes it’s travel or landscape photography, and I hate not even knowing where the photos were taken. Were they shot specifically for this purpose? To come with cheap frames? Or are they like... contest winners or something? If it’s a photo of people, were those people aware at the time of the photoshoot that thousands of pictures of themselves would be mass produced? Is that what they signed up for? That after lining the shelves of Walmarts across the world, more photos of themselves will end up being thrown in in the trashcan than most people have printed of themselves in a lifetime? Do they get royalties of any kind?

Also, doesn’t this seem like a missed opportunity for burgeoning photographers to promote their work? Why not make it commonplace to include the name and website of the photographer who took them? I can’t be the only person who occasionally sees a fantastic photo in a frame and thinks, “I’d actually consider hanging this person’s work in my house, I’d love to see more of what they do!” And if it’s of people, the people featured are usually so pretty and well photographed that it’s almost a shame to give the frame as a gift, right? Because you know the person you’re giving it to is just going to take it out and replace it with some hideous photo they took with their phone, and probably, let’s be honest, one featuring much less attractive people.

I also think about how the photos are chosen from a marketing standpoint, insofar as what types of people are chosen to be featured in each frame and of what nationality. There must be tons of market research concerning the likelihood of people to either buy or not buy a frame depending on whether the models (or possibly contest winners?) inside of it resemble themselves or their family. So who selects which photos go in which frames and in which geographic markets? Is it the Richards Group? Probably not...

I’m too lazy to spend time finding the exact details, so I’m just going to wing it here, but one of my absolute favorite advertising stories is from a top ad exec that was around during the 1970s when large corporations first started deciding that black people were a demographic they’d like to start marketing to. He recalled how it was still unproven and risky at the time, so they were rarely willing to spend much time or money on the black ad campaigns. He said that, in fact, they would simply clear the white actors from the set and bring in the black ones to shoot the exact same ad, just with a different color of actor. It was almost like an afterthought, and none of the words or details were changed whatsoever to appeal to a black audience. They wanted to do it as quickly and as cheaply as possible, so not only did the ad copy remain the same, he said that on many occasions, they didn’t even bother to re-dress the sets.

So you’d have an ad with a black family, supposedly relaxing in their own bedroom at home, but hanging above the bed or on sitting on the nightstand, were framed photos of the white family from the previous shoot. The “real” shoot, the “real” family.

It might seem like a minor detail, but if seeing black people depicted in mainstream advertising was a new and perhaps even scandalous phenomenon at the time, you better believe that certain facets of the American public were looking at these advertisements with a fine-toothed comb. The two different ads (white vs black actors) didn’t run in the same markets, so the black audience would have no idea who these white people were supposed to be in the photo frames that seemed to populate this black family’s home. How odd that must have been. I can think of very few reasons why I would display a photo of someone else’s family on my nightstand or above my bed. None of the reasons are very plausible, and most are rather bizarre.

I do, however, have real life experience with exactly one reason.

I talk HERE about my grandmother’s battle with Alzheimer’s, so perhaps you can already guess where this is heading, but for a while, in the early-onset years, my grandmother, Nanny, continued to maintain her own home. Although I’m sure daily life was a constant challenge for her— one that regularly vacillated between confusing and downright terrifying —I like to think of this era fondly as her “comedy years.”

Her disease continually presented itself in new, interesting, and often humorous ways, and since we did not yet know what exactly was going on inside her brain, we were still trying to figure out for ourselves what it was we were witnessing. For a while, she was very good at hiding the situation from us, and later, I would selfishly help her so that we could keep on traveling together, without my parents interfering. (I was like ten, so give me a break, please! She took me many places I wouldn’t have gotten to go otherwise!)

I enjoyed spending time with Nanny and on many occasions (her good days) it was easy to forget she had any memory problem at all. Other days were rough. I recognized at one point that she didn’t always know which telltale signs of Alzheimer’s she wasn’t hiding very well.

I don’t know if this is something old people still do quite as much, but it used to be quite common for folks of a certain age to have an unwieldy number of framed photos on display in their homes. Multiple shelves, cabinets, and even whole tables would be filled to capacity with framed photos in various shapes and sizes. There would be layers of photos— frames in front of frames in front frames, so that half of the pictures you couldn’t even see. So popular and prolific was this display tendency amongst the elderly, that giving a lovely photo frame as a gift was always appreciated and well received. They’d receive a new frame, fill it with a recent photo of their grandchildren or whatnot, then wedge it in with all the rest.

The problem was, Nanny would forget the crucial step of replacing the stock photo with a real one. I desperately wished that her friends would stop giving her these frames, or at least have the decency to fill them with authentic photos first, because as Nanny’s memory problems worsened, she began prominently displaying stock photos all over her house. Peppered in with all the real photos of our family, there would be photos of beautiful strangers we’d never met, the people that came with the frame.

This was in direct violation of our pact to hide the truth about just how bad her memory was deteriorating, and every time I spent the night at her house I would go around the whole house and frantically gather up all the framed photos of these pretend, beautiful people. Sometimes she’d even taken the time to hang them on the wall or prominently feature them on the mantle. Can you blame her? I want to state again that oftentimes the photography that comes with a frame is quite good and the people are quite pretty! If I had to pick between hanging up a stock photo of a beautiful, perfectly lit family and a shitty one taken with either a Polaroid camera or by a semi-professional photographer in one of those cheap department store portrait factories, just based on merit alone I, too, would choose the stock photo every time!

The problem, however, wasn’t just that she was displaying stock photos. I know several people without Alzheimer’s who, after receiving a frame as a gift, might temporarily prop it up with rest, as it awaits its proper photo fulfillment. (But actually hanging it up in the wall, ugh, Nanny, that’s a bit harder to explain…! And who keeps giving you all these photo frames? I wish they would please stop it! Don’t they know they're making my job very difficult?!)

The real problem, and the reason why I’d always hastily gather them all up and hide them before my parents or anyone else had a chance to see them prominently displayed, was because of what they inevitably led to. If you asked Nanny about the people in the fake photo, even on her best day and at the best of her ability to pick up on context clues and downplay her memory problem appropriately, the Framed Photo Area was a dangerous place in her house to be. It wouldn’t take any intelligent person very long to figure out that not only was she unsure of who those people were in the stock photos, but that she no longer knew who half the people were in any of her frames. It pointed back to why she was displaying the pretty strangers in the first place: they were no more or less recognizable to her than most of the people featured on her any of her tables or shelves. The photography was just superior and more professional and therefore (in her mind, I'm guessing) worthy of more prominent placement. After I’d hide them, sometimes she’d surprise me later by asking about them.

"Ryan, what did you do with the beautiful photo of everyone at the park? I love that picture! Everyone looked so lovely!”

"I agree, Nanny, everyone looked great, but we don’t know those people."

"What?"

"Someone gave you that frame, and those are the people who came with it."

"Why would they do that?"

"I don’t know, but they seem to do it a lot."

"I wish they’d stop."

"You and me both, Nanny!"

Thinking of the drawer where I’d hidden all these frames and how I was quickly running out of room, I couldn’t agree more. I wish her friends would stop giving her so many frames!

I also remember thinking how unfortunate it was that almost every person in these stock photos looked as if they could easily be part of our family. If they looked more like the Huxtables, perhaps Nanny would be less likely to keep putting them up. But they didn’t, it was the late 1980s, and as a sign of the times, they all had blonde hair and blue eyes, just like us. It was the exact opposite problem as the family in the black ad campaigns. Unless you were a Covington and knew verbatim our family tree, no one that visited Nanny would think twice about the veracity of the people in these photos. We could easily shoot an ad campaign here on this set, featuring Nanny, and no one would sense anything was out of place. The audience would be fooled.

Unless of course you were family— which oddly enough, is the only audience Nanny and were interested in deceiving about the severity of her mental deterioration.

The photo above, that I shot of my parents, reminds me of the kind of stock photography that used to come in off-the-shelf frames; and that kind of photography, in turn, always reminds me of Nanny. The stock photos have long since become much more diverse and racially inclusive, but to this day I still get tickled when I happen on an all-white family in the frame isle that I know my Nanny would have probably tried to display on the wall.

It brings me back full circle, to wondering who took this photo and who are these people? And what a strange and uniquely intimate way for an actor/model to enter a person’s home. Additionally, the photography is usually better on a technical level than what most people can achieve on their own and will likely make you feel a little bit bad about the quality of whatever photo you are replacing it with. The people are probably prettier than the ones in your photo, too, but this fake family’s final destination is always ultimately the trash can.

Or, in some very special instances, briefly the wall or a shelf or the mantle, and then eventually an increasingly crowded drawer full of dozens of other fake white families.