‘Empty Frames’
— Reneé Bibby
Stock photography can be a joke, a punchline delivered two beats too late to be really funny. The industry aims so hard for an “ideal” version of a concept it blazes right by the sometimes ugly, far-from-perfect-but-always-genuine into the anesthetized and insincere of the overwrought. The internet has taken the industry to task many times, creating memes out of their most ridiculous notions of humans. While a few within the industry have made specific calls to diversify their image stock, most recently in my work I did a search for a book group and found mainly white people circled around bibles.
Juliet Kinder’s ‘Empty Frames’ has more bite than any meme. She critiques the insidious white, heteronormativity of the stock images by creating a life for the stock-photography family. The strict unrealistic tension of living inside a frame pressures the Wife to murderous breaking point. In the thin margins outside the frame of the camera, the Husband furtively explores his sexuality, and the kids, nameless and faceless, are doomed to grow into the same frustrated and unfulfilled versions of their parents. The cameraman has a role to play, as well, the one who forces the subjects into the frame to live a superficial ideal. By revealing their secret lives, Kinder mocks any argument the stock industry might make about real people, because underneath even the most neatly framed and curated family is a simmering, repressed boil of real emotions that can’t be captured in small frames.