A History of the World According to Getty Images
2022 · 19m · Norway
Directed by Richard Misek
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative
A montage of archival images controlled by Getty Images becomes an investigation into who owns, profits from, and controls the visual history of the world.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Getty Images as the villain of visual culture is a fun provocation, but the essay-film format here feels a bit *expected* — like Misek's doing the obvious intellectual work. Where's the formal move that actually breaks the frame?
Misek situates this precisely in the lineage of institutional critique cinema (Harun Farocki, Trevor Paglen) while using the essay film's montage tradition to turn stock photography against itself — the editing becomes the argument, and that's rigorous curatorial thinking.
The decision to *use* Getty's own imagery while interrogating Getty's control is clever, but what really lands is how Misek lets the metadata and search logic become visible through pacing — it's a formal choice on a shoestring that makes the invisible economics suddenly tangible.