All about R2T2’s stock (and other) photos

I've learned many, many things while building Reflecting Rainbow Tweens & Teens. One of them is that there actually are some really great stock photos out there. Yes, many of them still look like they belong on an 2010s (or earlier) website.

But there are so many out there now that are well done and that feature, in this instance, actual queer and trans people, including young couples, individuals of all ages, groups of friends, and parents with their children. It's really kind of amazing and affirming.

Those of us who’ve been around the block a few times in queer and trans communities or in direct service to young people have likely seen our fill of images of depressed and hopeless children and youth. We “around-the-blockers” all know, of course, that the reason these images exist is because they’re accurate. The rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicidality among queer and trans young people are very, very sobering. But at the same time, there are already happy, secure, fully loved queer and trans young people.

I offer us images of happy tweens and teens because, if that’s what we want to see more of, we have to build a world where that’s even more possible. We aren’t there yet, at least not for way too many of our tweens and teens. And that’s where you — where all of us — come in.

This website calls on adults to act. Every action that we take brings us one step closer to innumerable happy queer and trans young people who are more than stock photos.

All of the photos on Reflecting Rainbow Tweens & Teens are stock photos, Google image search results, images on Flickr, or, for one page, my own pictures. None is made by AI unless one's slipped by me.

And you might have seen an image on another website; i'm not the only one out here using free stock photos. It's true that i'm an amateur photographer. But i don't have and can't easily get permission from most of the folx in, say, my Pride photos to use their images here.

With one exception, i'm only using photos here that are free, either because the stock photo website doesn't charge for them or because i got a short-term deal where i could download a certain number of images for free before a paid subscription started. There are thousands of other stock photos out there that i'm not willing to pay for, a decision that further decreased the diversity of the pictures i was able to access. :-/

*My exception was Envato Elements, a site with a somewhat more refined search engine than the other sites i used. The pictures there were more likely to be of actual queer or trans people. They also had more diverse people photographed than most of the other stock photo sites i used. I paid $42 for a one-month subscription and got almost 200 photos -- well worth a 3o-day investment.

I got my photos from the following sites:

• AdobeStock
• Creative Commons
• Envato Elements (This was the one site i paid for. You can read more about that under the "Ages of the folx pictured in R2T2" section of this page.)
• FreePik
• Google Images
• iStock
• Pexels
• PikWizard
• Pixabay
• Seek PNG
• Shopify
• Unsplash
• Vecteezy

They aren't. I found that some kinds of people are noticeably lacking in stock photos, which you can read about in the "Stock Photo Diversity" section of this page. Some of these deficiencies are because of a lack of diversity in who's photographed.

But part of it is also because stock photo website search functions can be...lacking...at best. No matter how many times i told a website that i wanted pictures of, say, Latine/Latinx women, i would still get results filled with white and Asian people who presented as men.

Sigh.

Also, i wasn't willing to pay for all but one stock photo site. Some stock photos require hundreds of dollars each to use legally -- and i ain't a newspaper with that kind of budget.

So i turned to Google image searches to help eliminate some of the gaps. Doing that was definitely helpful, but it didn't fill in representation of everyone who's missing or underrepresented here. You can read more about that in the "What are the demographics of the people in the stock photos you ended up downloading?" question here.

I've captioned the photos where required by the site i downloaded them from. I haven't in the other instances because it takes a chunk of additional time to save the necessary information, to format it correctly for WordPress, and then to test it once it's entered.

In addition to the pictures on most pages of R2T2, you can see a slideshow of some other great photos. You don't want to miss it! There's even music you can turn on to make viewing them not only visually interesting but auditorally interesting, too.

Throughout this site, there are pictures of some of the same people. But you won't find any duplicated pictures themselves (unless i've missed something).

Go check out that slideshow to reaffirm how darn cute queer and trans people are!

These questions may seem unrelated. But one has a direct baring on the other.

First, as to why there aren't many pictures of tweens on this website, it's not for a lack of tween stock photos -- there are tons, mostly adorable. It's that, unless a photo of a tween expressly identified them as queer or trans either via caption or via having them surrounded by a pride flag, i haven't used their image here. And unlike with teen and younger adult photos, images of queer or trans tweens aren't going to be obvious by, for example, showing them kissing each other. And that's highly appropriate; 10-year-olds who aren't ace are not generally in a developmental stage where they're interested in kissing.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with being queer or trans. As i've been reminded in looking through thousands of stock photos, there's that great quote sometimes seen on protest signs: "If God hates us, why are we so cute?" But to associate a tween, without their consent, with a highly stigmatized identity just doesn't feel right, even if the individual tween is unlikely to ever know that their picture is here.

Hence, i used a rainbow flag as one very important indication that a tween was, in fact, Family. There are plenty of rainbow flags in pictures of older young people, as well. But there were other indications i could use when looking at their photos to judge someone's sexual orientation or gender identity. (See below for more on that.)

Unlike with tweens, stock photos of teens and younger adults can be much more obvious: they're kissing, they're "cross-dressing," they're marching in Pride parades, they're hugging in a way that's just on the other side of "friends," etc. Also, stock photo captions of youth and younger adults are more likely to identify a person as queer or trans.

I was also more willing to stretch with teens to include photos that might not have expressly identified someone as queer or trans but where their gender expression makes them look like they might be Family.

The challenge here is that the gender expressions that drew me in were androgynous ones, where "androgyny" is generally defined as masculine female-looking people. This approach leaves out nonbinary people who appear to be both masculine and assigned male at birth, as well as feminine people who appear to have been assigned female at birth. But with thousands of photo results, the vast majority of which were of people who weren't identified as queer or trans, this was the most reasonable way to plow through things.

There are also an unknown number of photos of 20-somethings and not as many of actual teens here. The line between teenager and younger adult is, of course, a thin one; puberty happens on a different timeline for every one of us. So there can be 17-year-olds who are "fully developed," as well as 23-year-olds who aren't. And there's nothing wrong with either.

But there are many more stock photos of young people who are completely past puberty than those who aren't. So if you're looking at a photo of someone on R2T2 and wondering, "Is that person really just a high schooler?," the answer is a very definite, qualified "maybe."

Ugh. It's not great!

As with everything else related to race in the United States, finding BIPOC folx took extra work. So that wasn't surprising.

What was surprising was the relative lack of photos of people i interpreted as boys or young men. I think this is partially about how incredibly subversive queerness among men still is (at least in the US, where all of these photos definitely did not originate). Women or girls kissing each other has a chance of drawing a reaction that's less violent than men or boys kissing.

When i went to look specifically for pictures of teen boys kissing other boys, i found very little that was high enough quality, not AI, not from a movie or TV show, not soft porn, and not behind a stock photo paywall. And of the photos i did find, they're almost all of white teens, with some younger Asian men thrown in.

Another component of what makes finding photos of queer or trans boys challenging is that the presence of facial hair automatically ages someone out of the category of "boy" or even, in some cases, "young man." It's not that high schoolers can't have beards or mustaches; it's just that they're less likely either to go unshaven or to have the thick hair of a man who's past puberty.

There are several other categories of photos that were difficult to find. For these groups, there were some photos of adults but very, very few of tweens or teens:

• Queer or trans young people who are South or Southeast Asian
• Two-Spirit tweens or teens
• Any queer or trans young person who's fat
• Visibly disabled queer and trans tweens or teens
• Buddhist, Hindu, or Muslim queer or trans young person
• Boys (not men) kissing

All of those groups are among the most marginalized (which you'll find defined in the glossary) or hated/feared groups in the US. So their absence is hardly surprising. I resorted to Google image searches for those groups, which helped a little. But all are still vastly under-represented on Reflecting Rainbow Tweens & Teens.

The 379 photos i initially downloaded contain 590 young folx. Some of these pictures contain the same people more than once. So, in academic parlance, what follows below is a "duplicated count."

I also have some pictures of non-human objects or adults, which i'm not including in any of the stats below. If a photo contained a large group of tweens or teens, i didn't try to count or categorize them. And once i realized all the kinds of people whom i didn't have enough photos of, i started doing additional image searches; i didn't keep track of the demographics of people in those pictures.

In categorizing people, i used a standard of "how would a straight, cis person see them?" This meant that i wasn't always taking account of how a stock photo's caption categorized someone, especially when it came to gender identity. I used this standard for two reasons:

1. Most of the people visiting R2T2 are likely to be both straight and cis and, hence, are likely to use something along the lines of this same standard. I wanted to "see" what they were going to see.
2. I came to be skeptical of stock photo categorization. It's not that people who look feminine can't be men or boys, of course; that's part of what R2T2 is all about. But i repeatedly found captions that categorized people in a way that directly contradicted their gender expressions -- and if you're signing up, as an openly queer or trans person, to do a stock photo shoot, you probably don't have much incentive to lie to the photographer about your identity.
   1. Relatedly, i also found photographers using words like "Black/black," "African," "Afro" (as a stand-alone adjective referring to people, not hair), "Afro-American," and "Brazilian" interchangeably, sometimes for the same person in different photos, even though these words have different connotations.
   2. In both of those situations, i think part of the issue comes from bad translations; every picture i'm using isn't from the US, and it's safe to assume that all the photographers don't speak English fluently or even proficiently.

And, of course, i undoubtedly miscategorized a number of folx in the photos all by myself, even within the standard i was using that's described above.

So here are the demographics, determined by a very blunt instrument, of the folx in the stock photos i initially downloaded for Reflecting Rainbow Tweens & Teens:

Gender

• Girls: 72%
• Boys: 21%
• Non-binary/unsure: 7%

Race/ethnicity

• White: 46%
• Black: 24%
• Asian: 21%
  • East Asian: 18%
  • South or Southeast Asian: 3%
• Latine/Latinx: 6%
• Native: 3%

Age

• Teens: 87%
• Tweens: 13%

You can check out the answer to other questions on this page for some of the challenges i faced in attempting to get as diverse a set of pictures as possible.

(What's alt text? Check out this article for some answers: Alt Text.)

Most of the demographic descriptions in a photo's alt text are ones i'm deducing myself from the way a person looks, especially around age, race, and gender. This can be fraught with failure, though, since it's not always easy to guess these types of characteristics based on looks. And as a white person, i am far from an expert in differences among races, especially whether someone is East Asian, Southeast Asian, or South Asian.

Occasionally, the descriptions of folx come from a photo's caption. But those were not always accurate (which you can read more about in the response immediately above this one). But overall, i did a lot of non-consensual categorizing of folx in the photos on this site.

I did my best. But my best is not even close to a vague approximation of perfect.