Original photography is expensive. So website designers on a budget often opt for stock photography.
If you choose well, you find some that goes well with your site, enhancing your message or the image of your organization without distracting.
But if you choose poorly, you can come across as cheesy and artificial.
One thing stock photo providers offer businesses and organizations is the chance to project “diversity,” which may be desirable to the client. This can work, but like anything it can look out of place or contrived, and not only because the viewer is likely to ask, “How does a photographer find a group of people who not only represent every race under the sun, but are all wholesomely good-looking?”
Anyway, I ran across that kind of photo today in the unlikeliest of places: the website of the Secessionist Party of South Carolina.
Yeah, yeah, I know: Party chair James Bessenger has been trying hard to demonstrate that his organization is not racist, most laughably notably by pushing for recognition of basically nonexistent black Confederate soldiers.
But, come on. Surely we’re not to think that this is the aftermath of a Secessionist Party board meeting. These kids look like they just collapsed in exhaustion on that hilltop after too many takes of singing “I’d like to teach the world to sing…”
Anyway, it was a bit… incongruous….
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And you’re just going to leave us wondering WHY you were looking at the Secessionist Party of South Carolina website? Are you being radicalized? Do we need to send help?
A comment on the post about white Southerners and our slaveholding forebears caused me to think of them, and I was curious whether I could find out more about their membership…
Are they one of these groups that promotes the benefits of slavery?
If I were either of the guys, I’d sue.
Sue for on what grounds? I love it when people say they’d sue at the drop of a hat… unless you can prove damages you suit is getting tossed out of court.
The pictures are probably stock photos with no copyright to their ownership.
What were you searching for when you “stumbled” upon that site?
As I said in another comment, I was looking for… wait for it… information about the Secessionist Party…
If you’re interested in the photo lacking the cheesy diversity of the secessionist party picture, check out photos of the audience at this week’s House Ratepayer Protection Committee hearing on the electric co-ops. It was full of co-op board members. They are less diverse than the KKK. At least the KKK has young people and a women’s auxiliary.