Friday, February 20, 2026

A Stock Photo Keyworder Exposes the Hidden Power of the Images We Ignore

Pasadena City College professor Simona Supekar brings her new book to Vroman’s for a conversation with novelist Mark Haskell Smith

Someone had to decide that the photo of a smiling woman holding a salad should be tagged “healthy lifestyle,” or that the image of a man in a suit shaking hands belongs under “business success.” For years, that someone was Simona Supekar.

Supekar, an assistant professor of English at Pasadena City College, spent time working as a keyworder for a stock photography company — the person who tags images with the searchable terms that determine how they circulate across the internet, from advertisements to restaurant menus to news sites. Her new book, “Stock Photo,” published in January by Bloomsbury as part of its Object Lessons series, uses that experience as a starting point for examining how these ubiquitous images shape the way people perceive race, class, gender, and ability. She will discuss and sign the book at Vroman’s Bookstore on Thursday at 7 p.m.

The book is part memoir, part cultural criticism, according to the publisher’s description. Through interviews with photographers, models, consumers, and industry insiders, Supekar traces how a stock photo moves from concept to usage, and what gets encoded — intentionally or not — along the way. She also addresses her own reckoning with her Asian American and South Asian identity in a post-9/11 world, and how representation functions even in images most people never pause to consider.

Joining Supekar in conversation will be Mark Haskell Smith, a novelist and associate professor in the MFA program at UC Riverside’s Palm Desert Graduate Center. Smith is the author of seven novels and three works of nonfiction, and has written for television, including episodes of “Star Trek: Voyager.” His range across fiction, nonfiction, and screenwriting makes him a fitting interlocutor for a book that operates at the intersection of personal narrative and visual culture. Supekar earned her own MFA from UC Riverside.

Before joining PCC’s English faculty, Supekar’s writing appeared in The Atlantic and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She was a 2021 finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, an award established by Barbara Kingsolver that honors fiction addressing social justice, according to PEN America.

The Object Lessons series, edited by Ian Bogost and Christopher Schaberg, publishes short books — each roughly 25,000 words — that investigate a single object through approaches ranging from personal narrative to cultural analysis, according to the series’ publisher, Bloomsbury. Past entries have examined subjects from remote controls to phone booths.

The event takes place at Vroman’s Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd. Vroman’s, founded in 1894, hosts more than 400 community events a year, according to the bookstore. Contact: 626-449-5320.