Ask and most small business owners or bloggers will tell you how difficult it can be to find high-quality, openly licensed stock photography for their websites. If a campaign or website calls for diverse and inclusive stock photography, you’ll more than likely come up short. 

That’s why WordPress.com is excited to announce the release of the Black x Tech stock photography collection! The Cocoamattic ERG, an employee resource group at Automattic, partnered with Nappy.co to release a collection of 90+ beautiful photos of Black people interacting with technology. Nappy, a company on a mission to increase the representation of Black and Brown people in openly licensed stock photography, was a natural fit to collaborate on the initiative. Nappy co-founder Jacques Bastien is a long time WordPress user, and shares the same passion for open source. 

Cocoamattic ERG co-lead Santana Inniss said of the collection, “Cocoamattic is a group that represents Black/African diaspora employees working at Automattic. Part of our mission is to increase representation of Black folks in tech. We know how impactful representation can be, and seeing yourself represented in media about technology can be the jumping off point for getting into a career in tech.” 

Seeing that representation of Black folks creating or engaging with technology was sorely lacking in stock photography, Cocoamattic wanted to tackle the problem head on. Santana continues, “Getting a beautiful, authentic collection of stock photos representing Black folks onto WordPress.com was so important to us. We selected Nappy for the synergy of mission, but also because photos on Nappy.co are now indexed through Openverse.org.”

Openverse, an aggregator of openly licensed media, makes the Black x Tech photos accessible from your WordPress.com website via the Media Library, or the Image and Gallery blocks.

Adding images via the Image Block

Adding images from the Media Library

If you’re looking to add diverse and inclusive photos to your WordPress.com site, that just got a whole lot easier with the Black x Tech photo collection, brought to you by Cocoamattic x Nappy. You can also view the collection directly on Nappy.co.