Shestock Launches, Offering Stock Images and Photo Assignments Exclusively by Professional Women Photographers

San Francisco, CA, August 15, 2013 --(PR.com)-- Responding to the growing number of unreal, unkind and simplistic images of women in our everyday world, Shestock LLC has assembled leading professional women photographers to provide their most artistic, visceral and marketable images by and for women in one location. Shestock’s photographers have also created photo assignments proposals for purchase, offering to create the highly artistic and commercially-relevant images that each photographer is passionate to shoot.

Shestock looks to use its images and assignments to help fix the broken dialog between image buyers and the women they are trying to reach. Founder Karen Beard’s belief that women consumers are misunderstood is borne out by surveys showing that 59% of women feel misunderstood by food marketers; 66% feel misunderstood by health care marketers; 74% feel misunderstood by automotive marketers; 84% feel misunderstood by investment marketers; and fully 91% reported that advertisers simply don’t understand them. (www.she-conomy.com/facts-on-women.)

Karen has been a professional photographer, entrepreneur, and occasional Art Director since graduating from the Art Center College of Design in 1997. Hearing from professionals working in all areas of the industry, it became clear that the stock image market is not offering nearly enough quality images by, of or for women. And the quality images that exist are near-impossible to find in the search engines of the large stock houses. With Shestock, buyers can either find stunning images exclusively by and for women in the stock library, or have the images they need created by purchasing an assignment.

Shestock’s other goal is to help professional women photographers get greater opportunities. In a recent survey, women professional photographers averaged less than one-third the annual income of their male counterparts – just over $48,000 verses nearly $155,000. (InfoTrends, Emerging Opportunities in the Professional Photography Market, 2013, www.infotrends.com.) Even accounting for the greater number of part-time women photographers in the survey (49% vs. 36% for men), this disparity shows that too few women are creating the images used to market to women.

Karen founded Shestock on the belief that the stock and assignment markets could work better for everyone. “As a woman, I realized in 2012 without knowing all the statistics that I was not happy with what I was seeing. The images I was surrounded by every day did not reflect my life or the life I think most women lead. As a photographer, I experienced shrinking income and shrinking support from the large stock houses. Finally, I saw Art Directors frustrated with the micro sites and too many low quality images, too much time wasted sifting through them, and too many compromises for images that they knew were not perfect.”

Shestock LLC is headquartered in Petaluma, CA.

Brief Bio of Karen Beard: Karen Beard graduated from the Art Center College of Design in 1997, with her BFA. In the following years her clients included Arnold Worldwide, Butler, Shine & Stern, Getty Images, New York Times Sunday Magazine, & Sony Music. Her work was part of Communication Arts-Photo Annual and she was one of Photo District News original 30 Under 30. She lives in Petaluma, CA with her family.