How stock images reveal hidden truths about cultural politics in America.
Thinkstock / BuzzFeed
Over the last few months, I've seen Yasmin's familiar face everywhere. On the front page of the Planned Parenthood website, in advertisements for Invisalign, in an episode of the woefully cancelled Selfie.
Yasmin's not a friend, or a relative, or even someone with whom I once locked eyes during an awkward train conversation. I made her up back in August when I created a simulation of Tinder in an attempt to get at the class-, race-, and education-based reasons people swipe the way they swipe.
I found her image after an exhaustive stock image search. I chose her because she was ethnically ambiguous, beautiful, and laughing; I choose her because she had straight, white teeth; hair that seemed "fun" but didn't signify as "too" ethnic.
I chose her, in other words, because her image connoted racial "otherness," but bourgeois "sameness." I chose her because I wanted to see how people reacted to her.
To build the simulation, I needed profiles, so I built my own: first by scouring Thinkstock, a stock image company owned by Getty Images, for a diverse range of images, then by putting those images through Instagram filters and photoshopping them into Tinder's distinctive frame. The results looked like this:
Thinkstock / BuzzFeed
