What's the first thing that comes to mind when you think of stock photos today? Let me guess… a prompt box, four options that all look slightly wrong, and a person who has never existed.
Nine years ago we published a post here called "Why we launched Nappy." The short version: if you typed "coffee" into a stock photo site, you'd almost never see a cup of coffee being held by Black or Brown hands. Same with "computer." Same with "travel." So we built the place where you would.
It worked. Hundreds of photographers contributed. The photos have been viewed hundreds of millions of times and downloaded more than a million, and they've ended up in classroom slides, church bulletins, nonprofit reports, pitch decks, textbooks, and on CNN, Forbes, the BBC, and beyond.
Here’s the thing…
Demand for authentic images fell off a cliff. If you want a photo of a Black woman on a laptop in a sunlit kitchen, you don't go looking for one anymore. You describe one, and thirty seconds later you have twelve.
And the industry has a clear suggestion for what a website like ours should do about it: add a prompt box. Generate the faces. Skin tone slider, hair texture dropdown, ship it.
We're not doing that. Nappy was never a warehouse of brown faces to drop into a layout. It was a real photographer in a real room with real people, not a generator that smoothed over the real details: the edge of a lace front, what 4C hair actually does in Atlanta humidity, a grandmother's wrinkled hands, a lively barbershop at six o'clock. Representation that nobody was in the room for isn't representation. It's a costume.
So here's our decision…
We're shutting Nappy down in the next few months. We'd rather end this well than turn it into something we don't believe in.
Until then, nothing changes. The ability to download will stay available until the last day, and then you'll get real notice rather than a 404 page on a random Tuesday. Every photo you've already downloaded is CC0 and stays CC0, permanently. Nothing that happens next can reach back into your slides, your site, your curriculum, or your campaign.
If you need photos, download what you need. Grab more than you think you'll use.
Before we go…
To the photographers and models all over the world who shot for this and shared their work: this library was never ours, it was yours. You showed up for a free site with no promise of anything in return, and hundreds of thousands of people found something they needed because you did. Thank you.
And to the people who used it: the teachers who used Nappy so the kid in the third row could see himself in the slides, the one-person nonprofit marketing department, the youth program with a $0 design budget, the therapist building her first website, the Founders who needed a deck to look legitimate before they had any money to make it look legitimate, and the church volunteer who makes the flyers–Thank you for nine years of it mattering!
If you're interested in taking over Nappy's site and content to keep it what it's been, reach out to us and let's chat.
- Nappy Team