Who's in the photos?

[jedimistress]

You know when you get magazine / leaflet literature from the government, or on a general website. Who are the people who appear in the photos which generally accompany the articles. Are they models? randomly selected? Friends of the magazines editors? People who happended to be around when they are going to press. Example: latest "Employers Bulletin" from the Inland Revenue. An asian women carrying a load of files. A woman in an apron hard at work looking at some plans with an aging asian gentleman stood behind her....some white guy working in the backround...where do the photos come from?

[bookermel]

I use to work in adult education, and we use to grab peeps from accounts and admin to pose for our publicity leaflets etc. if there were not enough willing students about. We also had to get permission to use to use anyones picture. I'd imagine that it would depend on the marketing budget as to whether models are ever used.

[elpea]

I work for a large public organisation, only very rarely do we use staff/friends for photographs as we have to adhere to guidelines regarding equality, etc, and can't work in a nepotistic fashion. Most of the people in our material are sourced from agencies who provide a wide range of people to photograph. We would not get away with using friends and family! Although sometimes we do use volunteers - particularly for a specialist subject. And some of these shoots are too indepth to rely on favours from people - they have to be there to work in a professional capacity.

[reinganum]

I work in a government department and our section (reasonably diverse with regard to age, sex, ethnicity etc.) were hauled out of our office to pose for a group photograph for some initiative or other. Don't know whether it ever made the public domain, though.

Another possibility is that they use picture agencies, such as Corbis, Getty or Hulton where you can get pictures of anything and anybody (although they have to pay for the use of these pix) but it saves having to do the donkeywork. The people in the agency photographs will already have given their permission so no further paperwork is necessary.

[mosesg]

I know my friend who is a professionla photographer and does al lot of this sort of work uses either friends/friends parents or people within the government offices.