The world through stock photography

I shoot a lot of stock photography. As a result I am mainlined into the world of fast turnover cutting edge photography. I would say that the most surprising aspect of being so close to stock photography is that stock offers you a far better prespective of this modern world and current events than probably any other media outlet you could find. Take the iraq war for example. If you check out www.corbis.com and do a search for iraq you find hundreds of pictures from the front lines, behind the lines, and even the other sides of the lines. It's everything. You want Tom Cruise in china? They have that. The stock people are the people the media GET there media from. Us stock photographers are the people who CREATE, FIND, SHOOT that which you are fed later on. To get an idea of what the world looks like before your newspaper or magazine decides how it should look, you should browse the stock collections. You'll be surprised what you find.