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. |