Schlock Stock

In the early days of the World Wide Web, stock photography sites were born.

Suddenly designers could search for images more easily than ever, and there was a way to deliver digital files to them easily and cheaply. No more big printed books full of teeny-tiny pictures; no more CDs sent by FedEx or, even worse, transparencies that had to be scanned.

But as anyone knows who has searched for images on stock sites, there's a lot of odd and inappropriate stuff out there. Sometimes it's inept search results (looking for tofu gets you fish; looking for an oak leaf gets you a maple leaf), but sometimes it's the images themselves.

A Tumblr site called awkwardstockphotos.com has been compiling some of the worst.


Unfortunately, they got a cease and desist notice from istockphoto.com after about a month of operation, so they had to take down the images from those posts, but there's still a lot of weirdness to see, like this bronzed, badly coiffed, bacon-decorated babe from Getty Images.

Via kottke.org