In 1996, aspiring actress Jen Kind took a job as the subject of a stock photo shoot in Portland, Oregon. For two days and $3,000, Kind posed for a handful of photos as a smiling college student. It was the only stock shoot Kind ever did, and she didn’t think it to be much more than a solid payday.
Twenty-one years later, she has a nickname — the “Everywhere Girl” — because her photos ended up pretty much everywhere.
“I still go to this Red Robin outside of Portland, and there’s a huge picture of me, half the size of the wall,” Kind, now 41, says. “Both my niece and my nephew, in different states and at different grade levels, found my picture in their textbooks.”
Stock photos, the goofy, sometimes downright bizarre images publishers use for ads and creative content, are distributed in a way where photographers take photos of their subjects and make them available to publishers to use in any way they see fit. There are countless stock photos available online — Shutterstock, one of the leading agencies, has 125 million images.
But since publishers choose photos a la carte, neither photographers nor subjects have any control where they end up. For whatever reason, Kind’s photos were a hit — so much so that the internet took notice of how often her face was showing up.
In 2005, British publication the Inquirer posted a story about her, dubbing her the “Everywhere Girl” and asking readers to send in sightings.
At the time, Kind’s stock photo appeared on both the rival Dell and Gateway computer ads, and readers sent in hundreds of other ads and brochures with Kind’s face plastered on them.
“It turned out that I had been an internet phenomenon for two years, they had coined this term, and I didn’t even know about it,” she told The Post. “They were even making puzzles out of my face.”
Kind’s face graced the cover of more than 80 books, “thousands” of advertisements, and even billboards in Idaho and Georgia, according to her friends.
Often, she ended up in places she didn’t even begin to expect.
“One of the ones I was most offended by was, I saw myself on the San Diego Republicans’ website, and I was like, ‘damn you,’” she told The Post. “I was on a little brochure that was a foldout, it was called Hard Questions of Christianity. I wasn’t offended by that one, it was just hilarious.”
“My mom has this package of three power strips with my face on it. I have no idea how I was related to power strips.”
Kind embraced her internet stardom. She started a blog and even contacted PR firms in attempt to brand herself, although “nobody knew what to do with it.”
“People have always asked me if I was a stock photo model, but that’s not a thing,” Kind says. “That’s not an industry you get into. I literally just did one shoot and it’s gone on for 20 years.”
But other stock photo “celebrities” haven’t been as welcoming to their internet fame.
Niccolo Massariello, who recently wrote a piece for Vice titled “Appearing in stock photos was the biggest mistake of my life,” unwittingly became the poster boy for a serious penis condition.
El Nacional, a Venezuelan newspaper, wrote a story about paraphimosis, a highly painful penis condition that can lead to gangrene.
Unfortunately for Massariello, the newspaper used his stock photo for the featured image on the piece, and tweeted it out to their 4.11 million followers.
“I expected to have a good time and try to be a model for a few hours, nothing more,” Massariello told The Post. “The whole thing was starting to get so ridiculous that the story, the penis one, surprised me and reminded me that the world is a sick joke.”
Stock photos often attract attention for their questionable use of props, as illustrated by this Buzzfeed article. But while they may seem random, they are often deliberate attempts to sell their photos to companies that sell the props.
Nick Starichenko, a Ukranian stock photographer living in New York, recently did a shoot with several cartoonishly large food props, including a stalk of broccoli and a massive chocolate bar.
“Food bloggers could use those photos,” Starichenko says. “Some companies that sell vegetables, the ones that make the deliveries, they also need those type of pictures.”
“Coffee is the biggest seller all over the world. People always need pictures of coffee. Everybody drinks coffee.”
Even veteran stock photographers deal with the quirks of the industry. Joe Sohm, whom MarketWatch described as the “king of the stock-image business,” sees his photos everywhere: While watching Hillary Clinton accept the nomination to be the first female presidential candidate of a major party last year, he saw a photograph he took in 1992, just as she was about to become the First Lady, appear as the second photo in a slideshow onstage.
“I was waiting for a plane in Houston, and every image in the waiting area was mine,” Sohm said. “I got on the plane, I’m walking down the aisle and looking at people reading magazines, and I see my photos. Sitting next to me, a guy is reading a book by John Grisham, ‘The King of Torts,’ and my photo is on the cover of that book.
“My name isn’t attached to these photos, so really, the only person who knows is me.”
For the 2016 presidential election, Sohm had press credentials for both the Clinton and Donald Trump victory parties. With no one giving him an assignment, he was forced to make a bet, and like many others, Sohm bet on Hillary. He went on to wait hours for a victory celebration that never happened.
“I held a spot for seven hours on a camera stand, competing with French, German, Japanese TV stations,” he said. “If I had left that spot to go to the bathroom, or get water or something to eat I would have lost it. As it turned out, I held the spot that got no shot.”