I was building out a website mockup recently and needed a placeholder image — something to show what a “team meeting” section might look like before I had real photos to drop in. I typed “African business meeting” into a stock photo site and scrolled.
Row after row of the same handful of poses. Same lighting. Same slightly-too-wide smiles aimed slightly too directly at the camera. None of it looked like any meeting I’ve actually been in, in any office I’ve actually stood in, in this city.
It’s a small, dumb moment, but it says something bigger: a huge amount of the visual language businesses use to represent themselves — especially businesses owned by people of colour — is borrowed from a stock library shot somewhere else, by someone who has never set foot in Pretoria, Tshwane, or anywhere nearby.
Borrowed imagery is still borrowed, even when it’s convenient
Stock photography exists because it’s fast and cheap, and there’s nothing wrong with using it as a stopgap. The problem is when it stops being a stopgap and becomes the permanent face of a business. A generic photo of “a diverse team” tells a customer nothing true about the actual people, the actual space, the actual texture of a business operating in Gauteng.
And customers can tell. Even if they couldn’t articulate exactly why, there’s a flatness to a website built entirely from stock imagery — a sense that nobody bothered, or that what’s being shown isn’t quite real. In a market where trust is the main thing separating one local business from another, that flatness is expensive.
There are better stopgaps. Sites like Nappy.co exist specifically to fix the worst version of this problem — stock photography that actually features Black and Brown people without leaning on tired, stereotyped poses. It’s a meaningfully better default than the big general libraries. But even the best stock photo of a stranger in another country is still a photo of a stranger in another country.
The real fix is slower, and worth it
The actual solution isn’t a better stock site. It’s building up a library of real photography — actual shots from actual shoots with actual local business owners — that can eventually replace every borrowed image on a site, one section at a time. That’s a slower process. It means some pages look a little unfinished for a while, patched together with the best available stopgaps until real photos exist to swap in.
But slower and real beats fast and generic. A photo of the actual owner, in the actual shop, on the actual street in Centurion or Johannesburg, does something no stock photo ever will: it makes the business unmistakably, specifically itself.
If you’re a business in Gauteng tired of representing yourself with a stranger’s stock photo, that’s exactly the gap we exist to close. Let’s get you real images of your real business. Reach out to Ronoh Media.