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Visual Communication, Vol. 3, No. 3, 316-336 (2004)
DOI: 10.1177/1470357204045785

Building the World’s Visual Language: The Increasing Global Importance of Image Banks in Corporate Media

David Machin

Cardiff University, machind{at}cf.af.uk

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.

Key Words: discourse analysis • electronic images • image banks • multi-media • multi-modality • photography • semiotics


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