Over the phone recently, they retold some of their favorite war stories from the stock business, like that time Tony found himself as one of the emasculated faces of French Cialis.
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It turns out you can make a door look like a desk if you shoot it from the correct angle.
(Sometimes that story is about a job promotion, sometimes it’s erectile dysfunction.) As part-timers, the Northrups often found themselves scrounging together makeshift props in order to morph their garage into a sedate boardroom or a corner office. As sterilized as stock images need to be, they force a photographer to generate a scene that tells a basic story with as much clarity as possible. Today, Chelsea and Tony regard their time shooting and modeling in stock photography as one of the most rewarding challenges of their careers. Photographer and model Tony Northrup in an image titled “A handsome man thinking about his diet and food options.” Tony Northrup/Shutterstock With the Northrups’ photography experience, they converted their garage into a makeshift stock studio and learned the business on the fly. For the first time ever, anyone with a camera could shoot royalty-free photos, upload them to microstock servers, and sell them for a few bucks to customers all over the world. This was at the dawn of the “microstock” era, marked by the rise of companies like iStock and Shutterstock, which took advantage of the internet to permanently liberate stock photography. But eight years ago, they made some money by shooting and starring in their own stock photo venture.
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Today, the couple work as professional photographers and host their own successful shutterbug YouTube channel. Tony and Chelsea Northrup have seen exactly how the sausage gets made. How does anyone capture the airtight nothingness required of a stock photo? How do you turn humans into vaguely human-shaped ideas? After all, nobody in real life ever looks that happy to be eating a salad. Yet there is something about the carefully crafted anonymity of antiseptic stock composition that churns the collective uncanny.
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They capture the human condition at its most pleasantly benign: a world full of delighted women eating salads, patient tech support employees, and extremely conventional wedding ideas. Stock photos are supposed to blend into the background like visual white noise. The Atlantic’s Megan Garber summed up the intrinsic quality of a stock photo like this: “To see a stock image is to know you’re seeing a stock image.” It’s a paradox.
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