'I googled 'white man' and there I was': Models in stock photos on seeing their faces in everything from ads to ridiculous memes

Stock images are everywhere, and you'll probably rarely notice them: on billboards and websites, plastered on advertisements, grocery stores, and print media. Taking original photos takes time and money. Image banks - which contain existing images that can be licensed at a glance - are a simple and inexpensive alternative. When stock image libraries opened in the 1930s, customers, often magazines, had to wait 24 hours for a physical image to be found in an archive and delivered. The internet has catapulted this demand to new heights. Websites need a constant flow of content. Memes are an unregulated stock photo market in their own right.

Stock photo websites now collect millions of images, with almost all images you can imagine available instantly. Urgently need a lone Santa, a flying baby, or a man in a suit sitting in a tub with a rubber duck on his head? A few clicks and it's yours.

By design, models that populate stock photos are anonymous; figures on which all sorts of messages and meanings can be projected. Here, six people - from professional posers to those who were shocked to discover they had become stock photo models - explain how their photos ended up in the archives. Me ?' model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.ImageBlockElement" class="dcr-173mewl">