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Smoking babies, toddlers with guns, sex doll love & other hilariously inappropriate stock photos
07.05.2017
10:37 am
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Just looking at these pictures makes me think a stock photographer’s life must sometimes be quite fun. For example, photographing strange and bizarre scenes that at first seem utterly inappropriate but once given a headline almost make perfect sense.

Toddler shoots Mom with loaded .45 found in her handbag

or

Jealous wife stabs husband over dirty texts from his lover

or

Shopping Mall Santa is a Serial Sex Perv!


You get the idea.

What I want to know is there a weird stock photography office where you can apply for this job? Do they have a photographic editor who sits chomping on a cigar like J. Jonah Jameson barking out demands for pix of “Granny Shoots Mugger” or “This Baby Smokes a Pack a Day Just like Daddy!” or “Evil Babysitters let Kid snort cocaine!”

These pictures all scream National Enquirer, if not the Daily Mail. Not enough aliens or Elvis to be of much use to the Weekly World News.

Andy Kelly is a video games journalist who, quite understandably, finds this kind of stock photography hilarious. One day while browsing through the “perfect, smiling models eating salad, high-fiving each other, and pointing at flipcharts in boardrooms” Kelly came across the image of an obese man by a Christmas tree cradling a bottle of booze and pressing the barrel of pistol against his head. The photo was intended to represent some very serious issue like say, seasonal affective disorder or maybe the rise in suicides at Christmastime. But, as Andy noted, the image was “presented so bluntly, in such an absurdly literal manner that it accidentally became funny.”

So was born Kelly’s Dark Stock Photos—“Extremely fucked up stock photography.”

Kelly started his Twitter feed last month. It already has a healthy following around 81k. Kelly’s careful as to which photographs he shares as many are just waaaay too depressing and a “disproportionate number” feature violence against women—which sadly reflects the kind of world we live in.

Yet, the darkly comic photographs Kelly does share raise plenty of questions like who buys this stuff? Why do they exist? and is there really a place where I can apply to get this dream job?

If this tickles your funny bone (and why wouldn’t it?) and you want to see more then follow Dark Stock Photos.
 
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More weird stock photo pix, after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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07.05.2017
10:37 am
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