Stock photography memes draw from the vast libraries of commercial image agencies where photographers stage generic scenarios for licensing. The images are meant to illustrate concepts like "teamwork," "success," or "family conflict" for use in advertisements, corporate presentations, and editorial content1. But the staged nature of these photos, combined with vague or overly literal visual metaphors, creates an uncanny quality that makes them perfect meme material.

The genre covers a huge range: a man arguing on a banana phone in an office, a dog in a Santa suit wearing sunglasses, a woman wearing a dress made of lunch meat, someone riding a tiny tricycle in a business suit3. The disconnect between the artificial cheerfulness of stock imagery and the absurdity of the scenarios is what makes the whole category so memeable. Professional lighting and high production values applied to completely unhinged subject matter create a specific kind of comedy that the internet latched onto hard.

Stock photography has existed as a commercial industry since the mid-20th century, with agencies like Getty Images becoming major platforms for licensing royalty-free and rights-managed images1. The meme potential of these images was always latent, but it took the internet's collective attention to unlock it.

The shift from commercial tool to meme source happened gradually in the late 2000s and early 2010s as users began sharing the strangest images they could find in stock libraries. Tumblr played a key role in organizing this trend, with blogs like Overly Specific Stock Photos curating collections of the most bizarre offerings, including gems like "Reindeer Man Rides Bike while Santa Woman Talks on Banana Phone and Rabbi Tosses a Football while Holding a Menorah"2.

Blog posts cataloging "the worst stock photos" became a popular format. One such roundup from 2019 documented dozens of absurd images, from a man in XXXXL jeans pulled up to his shoulders to a poodle trimmed in Minecraft-style blocks3. These collections highlighted just how deep the well of weird stock content runs.

Stock photography memes bridged the gap between commercial media and internet culture in ways few other meme genres managed. The Distracted Boyfriend image attracted coverage from The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Daily Dot, and The New York Times, which published the meme in its Business section in May 2019 to illustrate the proposed Renault-Fiat Chrysler merger4.

Nathan Heller of The New Yorker wrote that "the delight of the Distracted Boyfriend meme was not unlike the perverse pleasure taken by Distracted Boyfriend himself: it allowed America to turn its attention away from much more important commitments"4. The meme was listed by Paper magazine as one that defined 20174.

The photographer Antonio Guillem told The Guardian in August 2017 that "I didn't even know what a meme is until recently. The models discovered the meme on social media and they told me about it"4. The models, known by their stage names "Mario" and "Laura," first learned about it when people started posting memes to their personal social media accounts4.

Brands adopted stock photo memes quickly once they went viral. In November 2020, French clothing company Jules used the Distracted Boyfriend in a commercial4. The Hungarian government even used another stock photo of the same two models in a campaign to promote child birth, which prompted widespread ridicule4.

The "Distracted Boyfriend" raised copyright questions as well. Guillem stated that his images "are subject to copyright laws and the license agreements of the microstock agencies" but acknowledged that most people using them as memes were "doing it in good faith"4.