Romanian entrepreneur Serban Enache, founder and CEO of Dreamstime, shares in this interview how the company he launched in 2000 has managed to get to the top and consolidate its position as the biggest stock photo community in the world.

Serban Enache, an architect and designer by formation, started Dreamstime with a simple vision: to allow people to sell their images and make money during their travels. Then, he wanted to make high-quality visuals accessible to everyone. Today, Dreamstime’s stock photo library exceeds 200 million images and videos.

Dreamstime is currently the only leading independent stock photo agency. Around 2015, it became the world’s largest stock photo community and has kept this position ever since.

“We remained one of the few stock photo leaders in the last 20 years, innovating and improving the industry throughout our journey,” says Serban Enache.

The company’s success relies on a mix of ingredients that includes technological innovation and early adoption of AI tools to make the user experience as smooth as possible for both contributors and clients, a fair royalty structure for contributors, and a good understanding of its customers’ needs that have become increasingly complex.

“If you look at the beginnings of the stock photography market when there were no social platforms, for instance, and compare it to what we have now, billions of images, clips, and reels produced in just one year, the answer to lasting long is to adapt and scale up,” Enache explains. “We’ve been through photography on film, digital cameras, mobile photography, the social network revolution, and AI generative content, adjusting to new industries and various types of audiences all the time. Change is probably the only constant.”

In the Q&A interview below, Serban Enache talks about:

• how he started Dreamstime,
• how the company has developed over the last 23 years,
• the technology that powers the largest stock photo community in the world,
• what contributors and users appreciate most about the service,
• copyright protection in the age of content,
• and the challenges raised by AI.

How did you start this journey, and what is Dreamstime today? How big is the Dreamstime stock photo community in numbers (files, contributors, users, team)?

Serban Enache: Dreamstime launched in 2000, four years ahead of Facebook. All the images we had in our first years took up less space than the videos we now receive in a single day, so the Internet was in a hugely different stage volume-wise. In 2004, we upgraded as a community, accepting images from other contributors, and in one year, more authors were submitting to stock photography than ever before in our industry. We started as designers and site builders, and because stock photo choices were few and expensive, we also dabbed our hands into photography. By the time we launched Dreamstime, we had hands-on experience with content users’ and providers’ needs and demands. Looking back, it is incredible how the industry has changed: our contributors are now prompting generative AI to produce content for their designs. And just like downloading stock photos, software use has to be legal and moral. 

Dreamstime is currently the only leading independent stock photo agency. Around 2015, we became the world’s largest stock photo community; we still are the largest community. We remained one of the few stock photo leaders in the last 20 years, innovating and improving the industry throughout our journey.

Contrary to competitors, Dreamstime has been financially independent and profitable since its first year. Current numbers: around 227 million files online, 51 million registered users, and 1.2 million contributors (photographers, videographers, illustrators, audiographers). We have offices in the US and Romania, but other teams are working across all continents.

How have you climbed to the top of such a competitive market with many international brands, and what do you think sets you apart from other stock photo services?

Serban Enache: If you look at the beginnings of the stock photography market when there were no social platforms, for instance, and compare it to what we have now, billions of images, clips, and reels produced in just one year, the answer to lasting long is to adapt and scale up. 

We’ve been through photography on film, digital cameras, mobile photography, the social network revolution, and AI generative content, adjusting to new industries and various types of audiences all the time. Change is probably the only constant.

We have moved from offering just media to integrative AI-powered solutions that reach beyond regular stock photo customers. As far as we know, Dreamstime is the only agency that employs human and AI-supported reviews in parallel, with remarkable results: over 3 million files are uploaded monthly. No AI engine is ready to replace humans, but editors should refine the work of scripts rather than do repetitive actions.

Over the years, we’ve expanded Dreamstime to include a dedicated knowledge resource: our stock photography blog section and photography tools (such as WordPress, MS or Google plugins) to new platforms dedicated to free stock photos, Stockfreeimages, or our vetted premium stock photo collection, Megapixl. 

It is crucial to keep promises to your users. Continuing to offer quality service under price pressure and huge content volumes is a privilege. We have not changed our contributors’ royalty structure, which your users will always appreciate. Dreamstime still awards its contributors up to 60% of the gross price paid for a visual. Prices remain unchanged while the content quality has immensely increased.

At its core, Dreamstime is a technology company. What technology powers your vast database of over 200 million image files, and how does it work?

Serban Enache: Our journey began with a simple vision: to allow people to sell their images and make money during their travels. Then, we wanted to make high-quality visuals accessible to everyone. Today, our stock photo library exceeds 200 million images and videos. This explosive growth demanded innovative solutions to ensure a seamless user experience.

The initial infrastructure, while efficient, couldn’t handle the exponential surge in data, so we realized we needed a robust and scalable solution. We opted for a database with proven performance and reliability, ensuring fast loading times. A caching layer was implemented to significantly reduce the database load and improve responsiveness in our early stages. This proved a winning point; we run a massive database with minimal infrastructure costs compared to competitors.

Finding the perfect image or video became increasingly challenging as our library expanded. We needed a search engine capable of navigating vast data volumes with precision and speed. We chose a leading search engine renowned for its ability to handle complex queries and deliver relevant results in a fraction of a second. Its ability to understand and differentiate between plurals vs. singular, syntax, and topic is remarkably ahead of competitors and, in many cases, on par with or above the leading search engines.

These strategic infrastructure upgrades have yielded remarkable results. We have faster data retrieval, and users can access and explore the vast library with remarkable speed and ease. We boast a flexible architecture that can easily accommodate future growth, ensuring a smooth experience. Our intuitive search engine helps users discover the perfect visual content effortlessly.

Our team is constantly innovating and pushing the boundaries of technology to create an even more vibrant and accessible platform for our community. Our dedication to scaling efficiently ensures that everyone can continue to enjoy the power of storytelling through visuals.

What are some of Dreamstime’s features that are more appreciated by your users?

Serban Enache: Small details make a significant difference. The key ingredients are listening to your audience and using your product. And we’ve seen tons of people using each of these. There’s a feature for everyone, so we can receive fantastic content from people outside the industry who were not pros or fancied themselves as professional photographers initially. People became pros while creating their Dreamstime portfolios. 

We sell stock photography, illustrations or the more popular vectors, raw files, stock footage video clips, audio, and, recently, generative AI content. 

Our site launched when digital cameras were just released on the market, and photographers were debating whether the speed of digital outperforms the quality of the film. Then, people started using their mobile phones to take photos, and we launched dedicated stock photo apps for designers and content creators. We migrated from a website-only platform to providing several channels to submit or download content: mobile apps, FTP, API, remote tracking, and cloud synchronization. You can turn ON your Airplane more and still be able to submit images to Dreamstime during your flight. We also discovered that users were eager to send us their content instantly, but providing keywords was tiresome, so we’ve added AI-supported automatic tools to keywords the media submitted. This is one popular feature with contributors.

The website has been used by top collections and amateurs alike. The same goes for the designers downloading images. Dreamstime provides accounts to all major advertising agencies, creative powerhouses, and top corporations, but it also caters to the everyday needs of small design studios and work-from-home freelancers. 

Artificial intelligence has augmented our advanced search filters in recent years, and we have even added seasonal and regional search filters. We suggest content based on both visual searches and additional keywords. Users can include or exclude specific content, such as the number of people in a photo or their ethnicity, select ratio, primary color, RAW/vector filters, AI content only.

In addition to the broad array of content, there are various tools and features, such as free media editing, which is always appreciated by designers on low budgets, plugins for fast editing, and our own PhotoEye image tracking and machine learning API, providing AI capabilities remotely. Major corporations reach out to use our visual inventory for AI training or machine learning capabilities. Not to be forgotten, we just launched our Romanian version: you can now search for Fotografii Stock in Romanian, which was long overdue. 

We have tried to be an all-encompassing media service. Customers come for a visual, but in reality, their needs are more complex today, so we’re developing and adding new features or updating the existing ones virtually every day.

How much do the most successful Dreamstime collaborators earn, and what type of images generate the highest revenues for photographers in your community?

Serban Enache: One of the main advantages of Dreamstime is that everyone gets a fair chance to sell their media at all times. Our search engine is built so that media is displayed to the potential buyers in rotation over periods. Chances are you will see your images pushed in front, other times in the back, and so on. This ensures contributors have constant revenues and motivation to upload higher-quality content. 

Of course, there are seasonal ups and downs, but revenue for our collaborators can reach thousands of dollars per month. We are referring mainly to established yet active contributors whose content variety and volume generate considerable royalties, but small, very good portfolios can also earn significant amounts. The beauty of royalty-free is that your media may sell countless times, which generates residual or passive income and, for others, a whole new industry, the gig economy. Unless you sell the rights for a file, you can sell it indefinitely, and one single image can generate a passive income of thousands of dollars over time.  

One of Serban’s images as an example:

The upload process is straightforward: drag and drop your photos from your computer, you can use one of our apps, or you can synch your Insta accounts with Dreamstime for instant, automatic upload.

Most contributors approach uploading eclectically, in the sense that they are here to make money, and they upload subjects that sell, perfecting their skills and portfolio in that direction, mixing this with their passion for photography and craving for artistic satisfaction. We release a yearly report of best sellers and send monthly notifications about the latest stock photo trends, but the concepts that stick and sell well revolve around business, diversity, sustainability, and family. Vectors and backgrounds are always in huge demand and generate downloads if well executed. 

What are the biggest challenges in managing a stock photo service today? What challenges does the AI bring? How do you protect against copyright infringement in an age when vast amounts of content are generated daily and shared across platforms?

Serban Enache: The stock photography industry has yet to expand fast enough beyond the margins of its specialized customers. These designers know what to download and sometimes use stock photo agencies like Dreamstime as their secret key ingredient. The industry needed to push beyond boundaries and secure licensing rights for search engines that distribute much of the visual content nowadays. Unfortunately, many people still don’t know that downloading content illegally from Google Images may and will eventually lead them to trouble. 

Compared to engines scraping the Internet’s websites, Dreamstime offers an integrated, all-solution service, safe to use, and AI-enabled engine. It is a vertical engine that provides far more capabilities than a regular search engine. A vertical search may give designers the leverage they need against competitors, while a traditional Google-like engine will give you more mundane, cliche-like images. Considerable content volume is coming in, and the AI-generated content will challenge traditional royalty-free stock even though AI-generated content needs to be appropriately regulated. Then again, this industry has always been so very dynamic. 

At the same time, the AI and Machine Learning channels open up a new market for us because we can now provide content outside our regular stock media business. 

PhotoEye offers partners content filtering, copyright and logo detection, automatic keyword suggestion, smart cropping, privacy tools, and scalability to improve company and customer results and marketing, advertising, and creative campaigns. 

Protecting intellectual property rights across borders has become more challenging than ever. An alarming percentage of images used online are misused intentionally or accidentally. Last year, we launched our proprietary copyright tracking tool, LicenseGuard, to protect our contributors. The tool monitors, detects, and flags potentially unlicensed usages across the Internet, matching images from Dreamstime’s extensive database. This makes it the most comprehensive copyright tracking tool available today, considering Dreamstime hosts’ visual content volume. LicenseGuard uses AI-powered scanning technology and advanced visual recognition algorithms paralleled by human review. 

Our mission is simple: to ensure content creators’ work is protected and adequately compensated while providing a hassle-free experience for image users without getting entangled in complex legal procedures for either of the parties involved.

Acclaimed by the specialized media, LicenseGuard is a significant step towards the ethical and lawful use of visual content. It aims to change the narrative around copyright infringement by promoting industry-accepted practices and providing reasonable settlement solutions for creators and infringers.

One of the serious challenges of AI is the black box of current algorithms becoming even more opaque. Many industries rely entirely on engines such as Google or only Google. It is not a rule to have the best sites with the best offer listed first (for our industry, that being lowest prices, best content, and most accurate search engine). The algorithms were manipulated many times and will continue to be so in the AI era, with less curation ability from the moderators. Sometimes, you have to dig deeper for the best result, such as looking for “Dreamstime stock photos,” But who knows what happens in a manipulated dialogue with an AI or in an AI-generated article that doesn’t give you access to an exhaustive list of results.

BIO

Serban Enache is the CEO/founder of Dreamstime.com LLC.

Serban has over 25 years of experience in design and new media and successfully blends creative and executive abilities to manage Dreamstime, the world’s largest stock photo community. In 1998, he co-founded Archiweb, an award-winning web design company in SE Europe, and envisioned the later-to-become Dreamstime stock agency in 2000. As a designer, he has helped many companies, like Xerox, Unilever, various national universities, and private companies, establish or improve their online presence.

Serban handles the business development strategy for Dreamstime, and is deeply involved in the everyday operations of the website community. His approach is visionary, as he believes in disrupting business norms to explore new options. He is often involved in civic or philanthropic actions and believes in corporate responsibility and giving back to society. 

Serban is a licensed architect and graduated from the Romanian University of Architecture & Town Planning. He lives in Bucharest, Romania, with his wife and two daughters. A regular marathon runner and a sponsor interested in new models for societal improvement, Serban loves nature, sailing, and spending quality time with his family and pet dogs.

*This interview was edited by Romania Insider for Dreamstime.

Laurinburg, NC, January 04, 2024 –(PR.com)– Fulton Books author W. E. King, who was born in Charlotte and grew up in Greensboro, has completed his most recent book, “North Carolina Ghost Signs”: a photography collection that offers a unique look into the ghost signs of several North Carolina towns.

Author W. E. King has traveled all over the state of North Carolina and its one hundred counties. In the course of his travels, he noticed advertising painted on the sides of buildings across the state and started to get photos of them as he continued to travel. To date, he has found over 1,500 signs in North Carolina and has started to put together a collection of many of the photos. This book will hopefully be the first in a series of famous wall art and will feature some of the very talented people who continue to restore and replace aging signs across the state.

King writes, “Many times, the old ads were painted on barns and promoted such things as chewing tobacco and the opportunity to visit tourist attractions such as Rock City over in Tennessee. Many of these historic signs are still found on the sides of small and large buildings across North Carolina and many have now been restored to their former glory. Cities and towns such as Sanford, Concord, Salisbury, Lincolnton, and Mooresville, to name a few, have spent thousands of dollars to repaint and restore the old signs. Many remain just as they were decades ago and are still unique works of art.”

Published by Fulton Books, W. E. King’s book features photographs of ghost signs in the following North Carolina towns: Albemarle (2), Asheboro, Asheville (2), Badin, Belmont (3), Black Jack, Black Mountain, Browns Crossroads (2)
Burlington, Castle Hayne, Catsburg, Charlotte (2), Cheraw, S.C., Cherryville, China Grove, Clayton, Clear Run, Concord (3), Cooks Crossroads, Croft, Derita, Durham, Ellerbe, Enfield, Erwin, Estil, S.C., Everetts, Farmville, Franklinton, Fremont, Garner, Gastonia (2), Graham (2), Granite Falls, Greensboro (5), Greenville, Grizzard, Va., Goldsboro, Happy Hollow, Hardin, Jackson, Kelford, Lexington (2), Lincolnton (2), Marion, Mooresville (6), Mount Gilead (2), Mount Holly, Oakboro, Old Highway 70′ Pink Hill, Raleigh (3), Ramseur, Randleman, Reidsville, Rich Square, Rutherfordton (2), Salisbury (5), Sanford (3), Seagrove, Semora, Shelby, Siler City (2), Spruce Pine, Stanfield, Statesville, Troutman, Troy (2), Wallace, Warrenton, Washington (3), Waynesville, Weldon’s Mill, West Philadelphia, Williamston, Wilson (2), and Youngsvile.

Readers who wish to experience this memorable work can purchase “North Carolina Ghost Signs” at bookstores everywhere, or online at the Apple iTunes store, Amazon, Google Play, or Barnes and Noble.

Please direct all media inquiries to Author Support via email at support@fultonbooks.com or via telephone at 877-210-0816.

Modern photography is a game of technological recklessness where our brains are so focused on telling the camera to do everything for us to satisfy an algorithm. The skill comes with disconnecting from the algorithm and creating, not capturing. It requires intention. In the past year or so, I’ve become far more intentional about my photography by only using a single focusing point. For several years, I used the ones at each intersection point and the center. But cameras became so good that they could find a subject in almost any situation. Composition took a back seat — but using the center focus point is a slap in the face to that thought process. This all has to do with your camera’s autofocus.

This isn’t a piece about technology — it’s an article about how we need to take back creative control instead of letting the cameras make the decisions for us. Many photographers shoot in the continuous autofocus mode and let the camera decide. Others use the wide-area AF setting and let the camera decide what needs to be in focus. This turns the experience truly into a point-and-shoot affair. But it doesn’t necessarily make for better photographs.

We’re outsourcing tasks to a device while not necessarily allocating the other mental resources to the creative things that make our images stand out from what an AI image maker can do. AI can evolve, but we can, as well as photographers. We need to evolve to keep expressing ourselves in different ways and to dive deeper into our own ways of expressing our deepest feelings and thoughts on an image.

So, what does all this have to do with the center focusing point? That’s a great question. Your camera’s autofocus is making you a bad photographer.

Years ago, photographers used to do this process called center and recompose. It’s when they focus on a subject and then recompose the scene. And back then, they did it because autofocus abilities on other points were terrible. Now, all of them are pretty good, depending on the situation. But they can also encourage bad composition that makes you do more post-production. By using the center focusing point along with autofocus tracking and recomposing, you can get a higher keeper rate that’s more in line with your intentions to begin with.

That’s the important part: we must be more intentional about our image-making. We don’t need to be shooting portraits at 20 frames a second. No photographer needs to go back culling through a few hundred photos of a subject looking at the same moment. Instead, we need to shoot more carefully.

Now, I will tell you a possibly harder truth if you’re a photographer who only shoots for Instagram and social media. That truth: no one will care about your images for more than a few seconds unless you make them do it. And you can do that by using your brain and creative muscles to make a better photograph.

If you’re a photographer who wants to build a legacy, then you need to do a few of the following:

• Stop letting social media dictate your work.
• Stop judging your worth based on what an algorithm or other people tell you to be.
• Stop looking at your images only on a screen.

Print your images. Move away from outsourcing all of your creative tasks to a camera.

V-Flat World, a prominent North American producer of v-flats, introduces an innovative product line named Shadow Boards, taking an innovative step beyond traditional lighting modifiers.

Dubbed “gobos” (short for go-betweens), these boards are strategically crafted to replicate the natural aesthetic and color of sunlight streaming through windows, enhancing the visual appeal of food and product photography. Acting as objects between the light source and the subject, these Shadow Boards are meticulously designed for use in the studio, adding a touch of realism.

Available for individual purchase at $25 each or in curated sets of three for $60, the Shadow Boards are now accessible directly from V-Flat World, offering photographers a versatile tool for elevating still-life images.

Image Credit: V-Flat World

Cute, a new exhibition exploring the cuteness in contemporary culture, will be opening in London later this month.

We would like you to submit your photos of the cutest thing you’ve ever seen. Please tell us what it is, why you think it’s so cute, and when you took the photo.

Though there was one particular event that spurred Seven Hills, the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in June 2020, during the Black Lives Matter protests. “It was a reminder of the significance of making work in a place that I call home,” Chris says. “Bristol is historically a globally important city, due to its maritime history, which is as much tied to its pivotal role in the slave trade.” This event also ties to the series theme of myth-making. In the wake of the slave trade, how was it that Colston had been turned into a supposed philanthropist, with significant buildings, schools and statues all named in his honour?

Of all of the images in the series – pensive, golden-lit portraits, a fresh litter of puppies, huddled together, a lone gravestone by a tree, a young girl in Harry Potter pyjamas, resting on a family member’s arm – Chris draws our attention to one of two boys on a moped, taken near Cribbs Causeway, a shopping district in the far north of Bristol. “I went there to photograph kids hanging out with their cars, not really sure what to expect and wasn’t really being taken by much when I was there,” says Chris. “Until suddenly two lads rode in on what was clearly a stolen motorbike, they came speeding through into the car park, drove in between the cars at a fast pace burning out the tyres at the same time – everyone stopped and watched disapprovingly.” As the kids came past Chris he managed to stop them briefly, capturing a portrait, before they skidded off dramatically to the sound of sirens. “It was the brazen nature of what they did that stood out,” Chris says.

Seven Hills is a publication that feels like a “milestone” for Chris. “I’m proud of having finalised a book which expresses some of what I feel about my hometown,” he says. When people encounter it, he hopes to appreciate the aesthetic nature of the work, while also contemplating the message, using it as a medium for thought. Though the publication doesn’t mark the end for Chris, in fact it marks a start; the start of the photographer delving further into the themes so powerfully raised in this beautiful study.

Seven Hills is now available to purchase from RPB Photobooks.

The Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy will host a three-month exhibition at the Frick Environmental Center featuring the photography of Squirrel Hill resident and artist Brian Cohen.

The show is titled “Refugium,” which means “an area in which a population of organisms can survive through a period of unfavorable conditions.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Cohen explained, Frick Park became a refuge for him and many people. He said he became acquainted with the park in unanticipated ways.

“We walked and ran the trails in greater numbers, dodging and weaving between masked strangers,” Cohen recalled.

“Yoga classes and religious services were held in the meadows. The off-leash area became crowded with COVID puppies and their humans.

“It was an escape. It was a safe place. It was a place to be able to take a deep breath,” Cohen said.

“And that’s what this exhibit is, both an acknowledgment of that, and a way of saying thank you to all of the people who make that place possible.”

The exhibition features photos Cohen captured on his frequent Frick Park visits between 2020 and 2023. The London native resisted the oversimplification of “landscape photography” as a gallery description, but admitted the exhibition will be a departure from his typical artistic ventures, which heavily feature contemporary portraiture.

“This is the first genuinely, full-throttle landscape project that I have ever done, and that was lovely, and it enabled me to unashamedly channel some of my favorite photographers in the process,” Cohen said, pointing to artists like Andre Kertesz, Margaret Bourke-White, Gordon Parks, and Elliott Porter.

The exhibition kicks off Thursday, Jan. 25, with an opening night celebration from 6–8 p.m.

I’m not sure when the blind pencil vendor entered my consciousness as a stock character in the urban landscape. All I know is that he (he seems always to be a he) has been jabbing my blind sensibilities for a long time. I do, however, remember exactly when I first encountered a blind writer identifying with him. That was in the 1999 memoir, Slackjaw, by Jim Knipfel—who is the author of many books of fiction and nonfiction, and who I and other like-minded “blindos” (blind plus weirdo) consider the patron saint of blind punks.

On the eve of Knipfel’s blind-man training, someone at work asked him “what my trainers would do to me.”

Knipfel’s answer was: “First thing, I imagine… is they’re going to give me a tin cup full of pencils and station me on the corner of Forty-seventh and Fifth, just to see how much money I can make.”

Another friend pushed the idea further. “You know what you do? You take one of those pencils, see, and jab it into people’s eyes when they stop, and say, ‘Ha! Now you can go sell pencils, too!’”

This passage made me giggle when I read it years ago, and it made me giggle again when I reread it a few weeks ago. It was the first thing I thought of when I discovered a black and white photo of a blind pencil vendor in the New York Public Library.

As a blind person who wrote a book mobilized against ocularcentrism, I was as shocked as anyone to suddenly find one day that I had become obsessed with photography—or, rather, the obsession sighted photographers have with blind subjects. And so it was that I found myself researching the many anonymous blind faces in the vast photography collection of NYPL’s Wallach Division. This is how I discovered Walter Silver’s black and white photograph of a blind pencil vendor taken in the 1950s in New York City.

As a blind person who wrote a book mobilized against ocularcentrism, I was as shocked as anyone to suddenly find one day that I had become obsessed with photography.

Silver’s blind pencil vendor features a man in a heavy coat sitting on the ledge of what appears to be a department store window. The man holds pencils in one hand and a sign written on the lid of the box that he’s holding on his lap with the words: “Blind” in big letters, and in smaller print: “Please buy a pencil. Thank you.”

After having both sighted humans and AI describe this photo to me, I decided to learn what some blind writer friends thought—I’m lucky enough to have a few very good ones! Of course, I started with Knipfel. I emailed him a description of Silver’s photo, and asked him a bunch of questions that basically boiled down to: why does the blind pencil vendor continue to resonate? Is it, like, related to low expectations? Both the low expectations most sighted people have for blind people and, more vexing still, the low expectations we newly blinded people have for ourselves?

“Yes, there’s certainly that perception that the blind are so pitiable and pathetic the only way we can make what even approaches a living is to sell pencils on street corners,” he agreed. But he noted there was something more going on. “Even though they were once a commonplace and very real phenomenon, generations after actual blind pencil salesman vanished the image remained… it became a cultural trope. The tin pencil cup was as much a signifier of blindness as a cane or dark glasses.”

One might suppose that signifier has already lost its teeth for younger generations, because, as Knipfel pointed out, “images of the blind as anything but noble and empowered are being scrubbed away.”

Yet I find the trope of the blind pencil vendor (or “BPV”) persists in depictions of blind people and in how we are treated by the sighted. The blind pencil vendor may be a thing of the past, but his presentation of blindness feels indelible. I’m nothing like him, and yet I’m mistaken for him, or, at least, something like him.

*

The blind pencil vendor was already an old story in 1890, when journalist/reformer Jacob Riis went into Lower East Side tenements with a camera and the newly discovered flash powder that allowed him to take pictures in dark places, and came out with How the Other Half Lives, a book that exposed the extreme poverty of many New Yorkers. For Riis a hundred and thirty some-odd years ago and for many of us today, the line between blind beggar and blind pencil vendor appears blurry at best.

“The blind beggar alone is winked at in New York’s streets,” wrote Riis, “because the authorities do not know what else to do with him… The annual pittance of thirty or forty dollars which he receives from the city serves to keep his landlord in good humor; for the rest his misfortune and his thin disguise of selling pencils on the street corners must provide.”

The blind pencil vendor is not really selling anything. It is a pretext for begging. A shabby disguise which fools no one. Silver’s photo clues us in to that fact: his sign announces no price; there is no sense that he will be making change for anyone. There is only the ask: “Please buy a pencil.”

I emailed Georgina Kleege, author of many books including More Than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art, to ask her thoughts on the blind pencil vendor and why, despite (or because of?) his pitiful appearance, he feels like an easy joke.

“It must have something to do with the low value of the pencils,” she replied. “Why not sell something worth more, with more profit? Also I guess there’s the joke that he won’t know how much or how little money people are putting in his box.”

I might add: or, if people are taking money out of his box. It is not the first thing my “sighted informants” (thanks to Kleege for that term!) notice, but, there is a box to the left of the man that has a hole cut out of it. He appears to be dropping his money into that more secure place. This explains why he holds his pencils, and an empty box.

Most sighted informants find the stuff surrounding the blind pencil vendor quite eye-catching—to use a favorite sighted-people expression. To be sure, it’s a dynamic photo. On the other side of the window behind him stands a woman wearing a cloche hat, and the gathered curtains are patterned with a design that reminded one informant a little bit of Paul Klee. Most striking is the stack of newspapers bundled neatly in front of the next window over.

There’s all this interesting visible stuff surrounding the poor fellow that he doesn’t know about. It speaks to the sort of thing sighted people say to me often: It’s so sad you can’t see… the sky, this dress, how pretty you are (that was when I was younger), the spectacular fall foliage, etc.

But sighties also hit me with the opposite: it’s good you can’t see: that rat, how messy my house is, this horror or that. There seems to be an innocence attached to not-seeing that gets hung around the necks of we the blind.

The innocent ignorance of the blind is no more starkly put than in Kate Chopin’s 1897 short story “The Blind Man,” which briefly follows the ramblings of a door-to-door pencil vendor whose ignorance causes him to suffer many small discomforts but saves him from the final catastrophe. When we meet him in the heat of the day, he is walking on the sunny side of the street while everyone else is on the other side with its “trees that threw a thick and pleasant shade….But the man did not know, for he was blind, and moreover he was stupid.”

Chopin’s blind man is stupid because he does not remove his vest in the heat and trails the curb with his foot, apparently unaware that a cane (or stick) would be very useful in detecting obstacles and level changes. In other words, he is not very good at being blind.

And yet, it seems his ineptitude shields him from, first, noticing he’s almost been struck by a trolley car—which the reader/viewer is made, for an alarming moment, to believe happened. And second, continues on his way without noticing the death in his wake and the subsequent Horror “when the multitude recognized in the dead and mangled figure one of the wealthiest, most useful and most influential men of the town.”

I can’t help but notice that, in our cultural imagination, the blind pencil vendor/beggar seems always to be a man. Perhaps this is a kind of ironic inversion of the ancient blind poet/prophet (Homer/Tiresias). Perhaps too, the solo itinerant nature of the biz excludes women, who have traditionally been placed behind walls, while the blind seem always to be wandering outside them.

Andrew Leland, author of The Country of the Blind, reminded me of Chopin’s story (I had repressed it) when I hit him with my blind pencil vendor email query. He also gave me a delightfully sharp reading of it and the handy abbreviation. “The BPV is here a ridiculous, tragic, pathetic figure,” Leland replied, “but Magoo-like, he bumbles past any real harm.”

Mister Magoo is the blind cartoon character of the mid-twentieth century who traveled the most harrowing paths, never seeing (or experiencing) any of the dangers. Leland continued: “It is as though in his forsaken state, god spares him the worst accidents. He sells no pencils, but he somehow survives, hungry and bedraggled, anyway. He has no subjectivity—too stupid for that. He is all surface, pure emblem of ignorance.”

Unlike Silver’s BPV, Chopin’s does not carry a sign. He is the sign, a metaphor, a symbol less for the blind than for the presumably sighted consumer.

Unlike Silver’s BPV, Chopin’s does not carry a sign. He is the sign, a metaphor, a symbol less for the blind than for the presumably sighted consumer. The Blind Man’s inconsequence is reinforced by the worthlessness of the thing he sells. Chopin underlines this worthlessness when she reveals that someone “who had finally grown tired of having him hanging around had equipped him with this box of pencils.” And, as far as we know, he never sells a single one: “the man or maid who answered the bell needed no pencil, nor could they be induced to disturb the mistress of the house about so small a thing.”

What’s most pitiful is how hard he’s working to sell something nobody wants or needs. It seems like, across the decades, “a pencil is the most trifling of goods for sale,” as Leland put it in his email.

When I mention this to one of my sighted informants, he said, “Pencils are great! I love pencils. We should go to that pencil store I told you about, get a photo of you in there!”

That particular informant is my sighted partner, Alabaster Rhumb. Pencil enthusiast. He is not alone. At Graphite Confidential, a website that chronicles “American history, one pencil at a time,” I read a brief article about how a blind organization reclaimed the BPV with images of blind children urging “mayors, socialites and everyday New Yorkers” to buy pencils stamped with “To Aid N.Y. Guild For The Jewish Blind.”

*

Stephen Kuusisto (author of Planet of the Blind and many other books of poetry and prose) finds the sign of the BPV to be a kind of stand-in for autobiography—or perhaps a barrier to it. “His appearance on the ordinary street is founded on the principle of auto-graphein,” writes Kuusisto in a lyric essay that accompanies his poem, ‘To the Pencil Seller.” “Surely he cannot write his life?” thinks the sighted passersby. “We shall buy his pencils.’

There’s something particularly degrading about the blind pencil vendor. He is selling cheap items, but more specifically, these are cheap inaccessible items. A sighted person fallen on hard times might take that hair’s-breath step up from panhandling to selling pencils, but he could—should he fail to sell them all—use one to make a note. A list perhaps of other, more lucrative, career paths. But the blind man can make no use of the pencil–except as a weapon à la Shakespeare’s archvillain in King Lear: “Out vile jelly!”

Kuusisto is provoked, ‘after long deliberation,” to write a poem in which the BPV talks back, with mystery and eloquence:

The blind man is amaranth, a man-word of sorts,
A word that will be mistaken on earth.
Still I
Saluted the closed world
Without its consent,
Cross the water of streets
And raised a sign
Unreadable as the moon.

Yes. We are human-made-word in the eyes of so many sighted. We are inscribed with meaning: blind poet/prophet, blind saint, blind beggar….And this amaranth, life-giving sacred grain, symbol of immortality. Hence death. With its red-petaled flowers that never fade. We are inscribed BPV and I, with letters we are presumably not able to read, letters that stretch from ancient times to now.

*

The endurance of the trope was made apparent to me one day on the New York City subway. I was sitting on the N Train with my guide dog, heading to NYU from Astoria. A man came up to me and was confused when he found that the lid of my Dunkin Donuts coffee was in place. Nowhere to shove his dollar. “Oh,” he said. “I thought….Here’s a dollar.”

“Um, what?” I was baffled. Then I wasn’t. All I could do to deflect the insult was laugh in his face.

The confusion many sighted people show upon learning that I use the very same iPhones and computers they do reveals, time and time again, how alien we seem to them.

In The Metanarrative of Blindness, Disability Studies professor David Bolt describes an eerily similar experience. While waiting for his friend outside of a bar, a stranger tried to hand Bolt something. Thinking it was an inaccessible flyer of some kind, he did not put his hand up to accept—his “standard little expression of protest.” The man “seemed perplexed,” and paused “before asking if I was not collecting for the blind. At that point, though not in a can or a hat, a proverbial penny dropped for us both.”

When we are mistaken for blind beggars, it’s hard not to feel like our presence in the sighted world is being “implicitly explained by a cultural construct,” concludes Bolt.

To be sure, things have changed rapidly since the BPV haunted our streets. The digital era has a lot to do with this. We have access to books and information and tools of communication previous blind generations could not have imagined.

Yet attitudes towards blindness have not changed much since the days of Riis and Chopin. The confusion many sighted people show upon learning that I use the very same iPhones and computers they do—just tricked out with text-to-speech and a Braille display—reveals, time and time again, how alien we seem to them. Many sighted people ‘assume that blind people were just dropped out of the sky without any prior knowledge of the environment,” as Kleege put it. Such people are startled to find us in their midst.

After a Brooklyn barbecue last summer, I heard from the host that when my blind friend, I, and our sighted partners left, someone who didn’t know us said with surprise, “How do you know not just one but two blind people?”

This otherwise educated and hip human still fancies us as the other half, sitting on the margins of civilization with a tin cup, a sign, and some old-school (if sometimes fetishized) and inaccessible writing implements.

Enter the stock character riddling the blind landscape. They are the ignorant sighted person who remains blissfully, stubbornly unaware of the fact that such remarks make us want to poke them in the eye. But the accessible computer is mightier than the sharpened pencil. I content myself, with this brief sketch, in the hopes that they will recognize themselves, reach deep into their pockets, and produce change.

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