Why does it cost more to show people of color in museums?

I was looking through Adobe Stock for museum images for my blog posts, and I guess not surprisingly, most of the people pictured in the galleries were white. I tried searching for images of museum diversity, museum people of color, museum African American, museum Hispanic, but all I really found were some school field trips and one Asian family.

Finally I came across three great images from Erickson Stock. One was of two men in suits, one Caucasian and one African American, chatting over glasses of red wine at a gallery opening. The others were two images of a black man, probably in his 40s, in a dressy leather jacket sitting in a gallery. In one photo (see above), he is hunched over, lost in thought, presumably over something in the exhibit. In the other he is beaming at the camera with a fuzzy painting behind him in the background.

These images were great, showing a professional person of color at home in a gallery. The only problem was that these images were labeled Premium, meaning that instead of being included with my plan, each high-resolution image would cost me $250-500 to license it. Needless to say, I had some objections to the disparity in cost for images of black and white museum visitors, so I thought in this case it was appropriate to use the watermarked version for this post.

Why are these inclusive images more inaccessible? Is this a result of demand from Adobe members? Possibly. The difficulty with finding attractive models of color? Not likely. Or is this a reflection of the reality that many people of color do not feel that museums are for them? That’s probably part of it. Until museums create environments that are more welcoming to people from diverse backgrounds, images like these will continue to be a rarity. But it’s also a vicious cycle, because if I and other bloggers, museums, and media outlets continue to post primarily images of white people in galleries, we will reinforce the stereotype of who belongs in a museum.