Invisible Subjects

LeanIn.Org and Getty Images operate the curatorial space of the Lean In Collection archive. According to Perlman, "an archive is generally perceived as an institution which functions objectively and presents a neutral and objective reflection of society" (2). As a result of this perceived objectivity, archivists accumulate great authority and power to dictate how they want to reflect reality. In the process of doing so, the institutions behind the Lean In Collection have created the following subjects: curators, viewers, and consumers. Interesting, the role of curator within this collection is made invisible by the very institutions of power that produce it.

The curators consist of Getty Images and LeanIn.Org. Rose states that curators are "technical experts...who operationalise those discourses of culture and science in their classifying and displaying practices" (240). One of the main jobs that these institutions face within the Lean In Collection is collecting, defining, and cataloguing photographs. Through these actions, they accumulate status, authority, and power in respect to their stock photography field. Perlman states how "an archive acts as a system of control that supports society's mechanisms and enables them to exist. The very existence of the archive in society has the power to influence society's identity" (3). This system of control and influential power of the curators are made invisible through this website. Neither institution's website describe the categories that they have created to standardize the visual depiction of women discussed.

The Lean In Collection constructs a visual narrative of women that strongly aligns with the curator's of Lean In's implicit brand message - self-empowerment through the process of overcoming internal obstacles. Central to this argument, is the fact that the collection's photographs make systematic obstacles and any experience of struggle that women face in the workforce as a result of oppression, invisible. Instead, it focuses on the narrative in which women combat internal obstacles so that they can move up the corporate ladder and fulfill a leadership role. These qualities are characteristic of "power feminism" or "new feminism" which focuses on material conditions and how women can use money or other physical resources to create change (Foss 57). Most of these power feminists are categorized as anti-feminist (Meyer 10). This invisibility can be identified by the fact that there are no captions included within the images of the women and as a result, they do not have a voice. This poses a contradiction to Lean In's assertion that the women in the images have agency.

Invisible Objects

The objects that the Lean In Collection creates are stock photographs. As a medium, stock photography lacks narrative and verbal dimension. There are no captions in the voice of subjects, which disable content to be looked at and read (Owens 54). The passive nature of the silenced voices prevents them from being heard, fully understood or appreciated (Vaughn et al. 16). For this reason, the women featured in these objects are given no voice or agency, they are objects made invisible. This contradicts the collection's goal of seeking to foster empowerment among women.

Tamara Plush recognizes that "when contextualized, visuals can transcend distance and create a global dialogue around topics in need of deeper understanding and action for social change" (25). Once visibility of issues has occurred and global dialogue has taken place, workable solutions can be made. The Lean In Collection does not feature contextualized images or create a space for dialogue, making it difficult to create social change. Moreover, Plush notes that the "visual storytelling methodology builds on the belief that empowerment is strengthened by people constructing their own knowledge through a process of dialogue, reflection and action" (26). Women in the Lean In Collection do not take part in the image-making process. Even if they did engage in dialogue, reflection, and action, the institutions behind this collection chose to make these features invisible and did not include them on the webpage.

Furthermore, not all women's stories are represented or displayed within these photographs. Stock photographs are primarily geared towards the needs of consumer advertising and are most always focused on middle-class American and European leisure activities and demographic categories (Frosh, 2007, 16). These groups have significant disposable income. Within the Lean In Collection, women of diverse races, sexual identities, and socio-economic statuses are not represented evenly. They are often rendered invisible. The majority of photographs Getty Images and LeanIn.Org chose to include in this collection represent white, upper-middle class, privileged, and straight women. In doing so, they deem these subjects to be empowered and worthy of inclusion in the collection. This is what they believe women look like in contemporary culture and are trying to sell this image to potential clients. This is problematic because their collection is not all inclusive of every type of women, although the collection states that it is diverse by featuring a wide array of women from varying backgrounds. Only certain conceptions of women are made visible, the rest, invisible.

Invisible Practices

Lean In Collection has institutional power to shape the way that viewers of their images interpret the world. Lin notes how "advertising can be powerful; it potentially creates diverse personal needs, changing attitudes, cognition, self-image, and personal preferences" (61). Also, in Aikat's studies, she discusses how media shapes people's idea of themselves and the world (9). Going off of the work of Stuart Hall, Aikat reiterates that the media is responsible for constructing an image of the lives, meanings, practices, and value for particular groups (3). This imagery is responsible for constructing social knowledge. Lean In Collection makes very careful decisions in choosing how to portray the lives of women and their worlds in order to achieve monetary gains and marketing positioning, which benefits both Getty Images and LeanIn.Org. Conveniently so, the practices produced by the Lean In Collection are made invisible. These practices include production, distribution, and circulation of images.

The producers of stock photography and more specifically the Lean In Collection are professional photographers. These professional photographers most often sign a contract with stock agencies so that they can make a salary. The photographers manufacture photographs in order to fit the categories desired by the agencies, this aspect of production is made invisible by the institutions. This signifies a "direct intervention of agencies in the primary conceptualization and production of the stock photograph" and as a result "the source of creativity, artistry and authorship, the locus of cultural authority, is transferred from the individual photographer to the agency, while the photographer is transformed into a salaried manifestation of a corporate aesthetic vision. 'Wholly owned content' makes the corporation, or more accurately the brand, into the author of the images it sells" (Frosh, 2007, 8). Getty Images is fully aware of its authorship and wants to portray the collection as evidence of how things really are to the viewers of the images. However, the production of these images usually is staged and does not represent an accurate picture of reality. Photographers manufacture images to fit into preconceived "popular" categories so that the images will sell from the stock source. For the Lean In Collection, photographs desire to create images that all women can identity with and relate to. Feiereisen mentions how "increasingly, advertising practitioners are going to great lengths to design advertisements with female images that women consumers can easily identify with" (814).

Another practice that is made invisible within the Lean In Collection is how the stock agencies distribute the images. First, Getty Images categorizes and classifies the photographs based on a set of criteria. This criteria is then key-worded within the websites so that viewers and potential clients are able to search terms and find matching results. Rose discusses that in the act of labeling and making captions, certain sort of information are prioritized over others (246). In fact, "stock images are designed for classification: They are manufactured by photographers in order to fit the categories used by agencies in their promotional activities. Hence, the archive is not just a way of organizing pre-existing images: It is a generative system that helps bring particular kinds of images into being and into relationship with one another, reproducing itself (its categories and interpretative frames) in the process" (Frosh, 2007, 249). The institutional technologies that enable this classifying system to operate are "expensively developed, fast and reliable delivery technologies" (Frosh, 2007, 7). Characteristic of Getty Images and the Lean In Collection is how the images are displayed on thumbnails. These thumbnails are very small and make the subtle qualities of images invisible. Getty Images must assume that these photographs will not be seen at larger than thumbnail size on the first go-around due to the ever-growing quantity of images within the archive (Frosh, 2007, 17). The thumbnail is 'a template of simplified images that invites the superficially scanning eye, and which is designed to do nothing more, and nothing less, than populate the overlooked visual environment which forms the background to our lives" (Frosh, 2007, 18). Due to the sheer number of photographs on Lean In Collection's website, a good number of them will remain invisible for the superficially scanning viewer.

In addition, the circulation of images is made invisible by the institution. Lean In Collection wants their images to contain polysemy so that they can be reused multiple times and appeal to a wide range of applications in diverse promotional material for different products (Frosh, 2007, 252). Those who circulate the images, clients who most commonly are made up of advertising creatives and designers, value this quality of vagueness and many meanings within the image so that they can it according to their specific purposes.