This is something I’ve been curious about for a long time: in both of the major Jehovah’s Witness publications — Watchtower and Awake! — as well as on their official website, articles that discuss condemned activity frequently feature stock photos of people engaged in such activities. The photo in the upper left corner on the page here, with the two young women enjoying some kind of bottled beverage, is a perfect example of what I mean. Where do they get these photographs? Do they actually stage and shoot them themselves? Or hire an independent agency? Or what?
They come from stock photo agencies, whose sole job is to collect billions of photos of people doing everyday things (among other stuff.)
Here’s an example search for women drinking at a microstock agency that licenses photos on a subscription basis.
I am wondering too about those stock photos. They are unlike stock photos from other magazines. They have a weird feeling in them but I cannot tell what it is exactly.
That “weird felling” is because they are not photographs.
If you look carefully you will notice that they are actually paintings. The original source is a photograph, and the artist then reproduces the photograph with paint or ink. There’s a name for the technique, but I can’t remember what it is.
Point being that it makes the images look very weird, almost cartoonish, with very crisp lines, vivid colours and an infinite depth of focus.
And FWIW, they have their own artists on staff doing this stuff. Or at least that was the case many years ago according to an “Awake” article on the subject.
. . . or more likely, uses Photoshop filters. I can turn a photo into all sorts of painting styles.
They probably do now I suppose, but they have been using that style for well over 40 years. Originally, they were literally photographs that had been reproduced in paint. I guess at some point in the last 15 years or so they would have moved over to doing it digitally.