Last June, my morning routine was interrupted by a series of texts from a friend, showing a pair of screen shots that were at first incomprehensible. Neither the images nor the site were immediately familiar to us. The pictures hadn't been taken from our social network profiles, nor had Patrick and I ever online-dated. Of course, that's where my mind went first: Was my live-in boyfriend of five-plus years maintaining a double life filled with Internet honeys? But how would that work -- he doesn't even know how to send an instant message. Within a few moments, though, it dawned on me what I was looking at. In 2009, a photographer friend, Jenny, had snapped some photos of us around the house for her portfolio. When the shoot was over, we signed model release forms with the vague notion that she might offer the pictures to a stock photo agency. But we never thought anyone would actually buy them. At first, being an inadvertent star of an online dating ad campaign seemed hilarious, and I reveled in the joke, posting screenshots on Facebook and dominating the proverbial water cooler at my workplace, the. But the ads continued to run through the fall and winter, and gradually they came to haunt me. Looking at the New York Times website over the shoulder of my boss, I'd spy Patrick, seemingly the happiest, most single guy amid other happy, supposedly single guys. Acquaintances and friends sent concerned emails and Facebook messages. I was just looking at something on NY Mag and saw this ad -- isn't that your boyfriend in here? Maybe just a look-alike? In any case, wanted to share.... Even more troubling was the notion that pictures of Patrick and me were floating around the ether, out of our grasp and susceptible to any insult or manipulation. For example, Jenny hadn't taken many solo shots of us. In order to slot our faces into separate grids of smiling men and women, the dating service may have had to snip a happy-together image in half. Is that even allowed? What else could a stock agency client do to my picture? Some Internet research taught me that examples of unfortunate stock-photo use abound. One 9-year-old girl was without her knowledge. In another case, a farmer sued Getty Images, among others, after a picture of him holding a goose. And in a case very similar to my own, a after her face appeared in an advertisement for the dating site. Were she and I victims of anything other than our own stupidity? And if so, whom should I be suing -- and for how much dough? To begin answering these questions, I needed to know who, exactly, was selling my image. At this point, Patrick didn't care much about the ads, except to point out that he looked really, really good as a single guy. When the photo was taken, it was not intended to be a stock photo -- Jenny just wanted some fresh images of couples to add to her online portfolio, as she often works as a wedding photographer. If Patrick and I had any doubts about this, I don't remember discussing them. We signed the contracts without reading them. I spent the next hour or so wading through thousands of photos, trying to find the picture of me that had turned up online and worried my friends. What sort of label or caption would my picture get, and how much would I cost? But this wasn't the image that HowAboutWe had used for its campaign. In addition to a title, every image had keywords. Having tapped Jenny for the meager information she could provide, my next step was to contact the stock agency itself. It was an unproductive and apparently unusual event. Thad Westhusing, vice president of Veer, had no information to share with me, though he did inform me that he rarely hears from models. I was still confused about the terms of use for the eight photos of me and Patrick. When Veer sells pictures to a client, can that client alter them at will? My biggest fear remained some kind of outrageous Photoshopping, maybe along the lines of what happened to a man in New York, who cried when he saw that his leg had been about the dangers of diabetes. It was hard to pin down Westhusing on the rules governing stock images. There are many different contracts available to photographers, he said, and each has different terms. He could not recall any court cases deciding in favor of a model who had signed away her rights as unambiguously as I had. I tried another lawyer, Carolyn E. Wright, who maintains a. She told me the same thing as Frankel, with an added dose of condescension. Now I was feeling queasy and confused. Jenny had done her best to make us look happy and shiny, but I am ridiculously unphotogenic as a rule eyes closed, chin-forward; Tyra has taught me nothing. How could this be happening to me, of all people? When I expressed my wonderment about being chosen as an online dating model to Brian Schechter, a co-founder of HowAboutWe, he laughed. HowAboutWe began putting together its national campaign last year. While Schechter didn't remember choosing the exact images for my particular ad, he said the faces were a mix of actual HowAboutWe members and stock images, with the goal of showing attractive, but approachable, people. Just as I was feeling good about my industry-approved attractive approachability, Schechter set me straight. Click-throughs and conversion rates for my ads and Patrick's were low -- low enough for the company to start phasing them out. It turned out we weren't that approachable, and it wasn't just us -- the whole campaign was getting pulled. When I told Patrick the good news -- that the ads were going away -- he wasn't very excited. The HowAboutWe campaign was fairly harmless and mostly funny, but after looking deeper into the stock-photo industry, I'd realized that worse things could happen. This is both disturbing and common: In talks with professional photographers, I learned that with copyright claims. We live in a time when stock photos function like the visual equivalent of Muzak -- ubiquitous and invisible, easy to find and impossible to remember. As they spread, and as we acquire more and more devices on which to view them, it's tempting for an unwilling model to just throw up her hands. It might not be so amusing if Patrick and I ever were to break up.
