RESOURCES
When Austrian photographer Anna Neubauer landed her first professional client, she was excited for many reasons. The client asked her to shoot all their upcoming collections. The shoots were to be equipped with a full complement of sets, stylists, and support. Her beloved side hustle seemed to have potential as a full-time career. Everything was going great, until the day of the shoot.
“The only issue was the model — she looked a bit different from her portfolio,” says Neubauer. “Which for me wasn’t an issue at, but after 30 minutes, [the clients] pulled me aside and were like, ‘Can you cut her head? Because she’s ugly.’” Shocked, but feeling as though she had no choice, Neubauer complied.
“I’m even ashamed I didn’t stop immediately,” she says. “But I thought, they’re my client and they’re paying me, I basically have to do whatever they want. But just the way they said really hit me, and especially when I got home, I was like, what just happened? Who are they to use words like that? Just because they happen to be good-looking...I hated the attitude. And that’s kind of when I thought, or started thinking about, what is beauty, and why do companies only use white people?”
That deepening consciousness about the beauty standards and the frequent callousness of the industry is part of what brought Neubauer to Adobe Stock. This year, she was chosen to create new work for the Adobe Stock Artist Development Fund, a $500,000 creative commission program. As an expression of Adobe’s commitment to inclusion, we’ve selected artists who identify with and expertly depict diverse communities within their work. Neubauer’s project centers around diverse portraits, including those of visibly disabled people.
Photographing with purpose and realism.
Although it took a few more shoots to extricate herself from the client, that uncomfortable experience sparked a change of direction for Neubauer. She moved to London a couple of years ago and found an agency that specialized in people with “differences,” as she calls it.
Neubauer now works primarily in children’s fashion but has also cultivated a stunning portfolio of images that present a highly diverse range of models, including those with visible differences, such as Downs Syndrome.
The widely inclusive range of her portfolio made her a natural fit for the commission opportunity with Adobe Stock. In particular, the Adobe Stock team has been soliciting authentic, contemporary, and sensitive portrayals of disabled people living life, all designed to address a shortfall of such images in existing stock. The lack of adequate representation is even more sobering considering that more than 1 billion people — 15% of the world’s population — have some form of disability, making the disabled population the largest minority group in the world. There is a strong demand for more visibility and more representation from an informed consumer population, which translates into a desire for such images from brands looking to diversify and connect with their audience.
Credit: Adobe Stock/Anna Neubauer
That may be the practical underpinning for the work, but Neubauer tends to focus more on the relationship between model and photographer, enjoying working with children, specifically, because shoots are infused with a sense of fun.
“You never really know what to expect,” she says, “because if they don’t want to do it, they don’t want to do it, and I would never force anyone. For kids, it’s just a game, and that’s what I like.”
There is something slightly contradictory about working to a brief that specifies subjects with disabilities, but also having a desire not to highlight the disability as the defining feature of the subjects’ existence.
“I looked at stock pictures before I even started — even before I applied for [the Artist Development Fund],” says Neubauer, “and if you type in ‘disability’ you’ll find it’s often kind of negative. I mean, if it’s two people [in the image], it would be someone helping the disabled person. It’s never them, like, cooking.” Neubauer knows lots of people with Down Syndrome, and bristles at the notion that there are few representations of them leading average lives.
Credits (left to right): Adobe Stock/Anna Neubauer, Adobe Stock/Anna Neubauer, Adobe Stock/Anna Neubauerck
More than Type-1, more than one type.
For Neubauer, that meant arranging shoots that captured her subjects working out, hanging around the house, and engaging in basic self-care activities like shaving. The result are images that seek not to tokenize people to sell things, but to represent a full spectrum of human experience. But it also means needing to be responsive to an individual’s comfort level, which varies greatly from person to person.
“I really wanted to do some pictures with flowers with [one of her models] Danny, but as soon as he saw the flowers, he was like no, and turned around,” she says. “He then told me when he was maybe 7 or 8, he got bullied a lot in school, and his bullies put flowers and cigarette butts in his mouth, so he can’t even look at flowers anymore.”
On a different shoot, a subject who is a Type-1 diabetic — as is Neubauer herself — refused to take her backpack off.
“We took some pictures outdoors, and she had her little backpack,” says Neubauer, “and I asked her to take it off, and she said, ‘No, I can’t take it off, this is my diabetic stuff.’ I found it funny, because she’s so attached to it, but I get it.” As a person who lives with her own disability, Neubauer can relate both to the nature of navigating the world with a physiological difference, and to not wanting to be defined by it.
When it comes to creating stock images, there is a fundamental contradiction: To make the point that people are not defined by their disabilities, Neubauer and others are specifically working to a creative brief that is about people with disabilities — and applying labels to the finished product.
“When I went through all the pictures and I had to give them titles, it’s always: Young, biracial woman with Down Syndrome,” says Neubauer. “It’s really hard, because if people want to find pictures of people with Down Syndrome, it has to be in the title. I always feel a bit weird about it, because it’s not all they are, but I don’t really know how to change it.”
Still, Neubauer sees a lot of positivity in this project, and hopes for it to be a catalyst for permanent change in the industry.
“At the moment we’re at a point where everything is changing,” she says. “But we need to make sure it actually stays like that, and doesn’t go back to no diversity, no inclusion.”
