If you’re a woman and you’re alone, you might be eating salad.  And you also might be laughing.  Put them together and you get a meme that’s already a couple of years old, “Woman Laughing Alone With Salad,” which is not only a simple statement said with pictures, but really does highlight the problem with stock photography; I had 10,000 choices on iStock to pick from when selecting the photo above.

Salad isn’t the only offender, though; New York Magazine took it a step further to look at other forced metaphors stock art is attempting to sell as creative.  Letting the photography speak mostly for itself is an interesting commentary in a meme-focused world; that said, I think the bigger problem is a lack of creativity in some stock art contributors’ ways of illustrating more abstract problems.  I guess salad and laughter indicates healthy habits? Dieting?  Either way, we can do better.