Stock Photo (Object Lessons) - Softcover

Supekar, Simona

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798765108901

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2026

Synopsis

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Part memoir, part cultural criticism, Stock Photo mines the significance of the stock photo in our everyday lives, from the ads and websites we browse, to the menus and memes that we consume. Through interviews with stock photography experts, photographers, models, consumers, and other stakeholders, Simona Supekar explores the evolution of the industry by tracing the creation of a stock photo from concept to usage while highlighting significant historical moments.

Supekar weaves in her own experiences as a keyworder for a stock photography company while reckoning with her Asian American/South Asian identity in a post-9/11 world. Stock Photo also addresses how these images have the power to shape our perceptions about race, class/caste, gender, ability, and more, thus underscoring the importance of representation even in something as innocuous as a stock photo.

About this title

About the Authors

Simona Supekar is Assistant Professor of English at Pasadena City College in California, USA. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and she was a 2021 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction finalist for her novel manuscript.

Ian Bogost is an author and an award-winning game designer. He is Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences, Director of Film & Media Studies, and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Bogost is also Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game studio, and a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic. Bogost is author or co-author of ten books, including Alien Phenomenology (2012)and Play Anything (2016).

Christopher Schaberg is Director of the Program in Public Scholarship at Washington University in St. Louis, USA, and the author of The Textual Life of Airports (2012), The End of Airports (2015), Airportness (2017), The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth (2018), Searching for the Anthropocene (2019), Pedagogy of the Depressed (2021), and Adventure: An Argument for Limits (2023), all published by Bloomsbury. He is also the founding co-editor (with Ian Bogost) of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons book series.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798765108901
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 184