How I Became the Face of Facial Recognition
Never underestimate the power of photographing technology
Much of the stock photography depicting the tech world is terrible, or at least highly inaccurate and staged. An infamous stock photo shoot from 2016, for example, shows models of various genders and racial backgrounds using a soldering iron to repair a circuit board.
The photos look great. Except the models are holding the iron by its element, not its handle. The element of a soldering iron gets to about 300 to 800 degrees Fahrenheit when the iron is in use. If the photos were real, the soldering iron would have scalded the models. They’re also soldering the wrong side of the board. From the photos, it’s clear that no one involved in the shoot had ever used a soldering iron, much less repaired a circuit board.
At least someone behind those photos tried to portray a tech concept accurately. Too often, photographers depict complex concepts like hacking or coding by getting a young, white, male model, dressing them in a hoodie, putting them in a darkened room, and shooting creepy photos of them hunched over a screen filled with green binary numbers.
While some coders do memorize hexadecimal sequences, very few people have coded using binary numbers since the punch card era. And the stereotype of…
