Stock

“Woman laughing alone with salad”: humorous and ironic feminist dialogue with stock photography.
Stock photographs are everywhere. With their contrived poses, unusual angles, and bizarre visual metaphors, they’re instantly familiar – and familiarly narrow in their vision of our society. Their ubiquity shapes and reinforces the biases, privilege, and stereotypes of their distinct aesthetic.
From found poems using metadata and keywords to riffs on stock image database search results with titles like ‘Good Mother Morning Family Happy,’ ‘Beautiful Woman Eating Salad,’ and ‘Lady Boss Smiles with Arms Folded,’ Delisle’s ekphrastic poems take a playful look at stock photography’s clichés and delight in all its strangeness, while casting a critical eye on its representations of women.

Jennifer Bowering Delisle's collection of lyric essays, Micrographia (2023), won the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize and the Writers Guild of Alberta Memoir Award. She is also the author of Deriving, a collection of poetry (2021), and The Bosun Chair, a lyric family memoir (2017). She is on the board of NeWest Press and lives in Edmonton on Treaty 6 territory.