Wikipedia:Unusual biographical images

English Wikipedia's policies on copyrights and image use mean that we can only use own-work, freely-licensed, or public-domain images in articles, and can only use copyrighted images under Wikipedia's special and very strict (stricter than the law) non-free content criteria. Not only are these criteria strict, photographs of living people typically also fail the separate "unacceptable use" guidelines, which act like a redundancy layer to make it extra certain that non-free images of living people are not used.

This is an essay on Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Images.

It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article or a Wikipedia policy, as it has not been reviewed by the community.

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This page in a nutshell: While turning an unillustrated article into an illustrated one is undoubtedly an important task, editors should use common sense when doing so for articles about living people: Consider not adding extremely low-quality or otherwise questionable biographical images.

Copyrighted photographs of living people generally fail already at the first non-free content criterion: "No free equivalent". It states that where a free equivalent could be created, a non-free photograph of a living person may not be used, because in most cases, a photograph of a living person can be taken and released under a free licence. This is based simply on the fact that the person is living. "Unacceptable use" guidelines include the provision against using non-free pictures of people still alive ...; provided that taking a new free picture as a replacement (which is almost always considered possible) would serve the same encyclopedic purpose as the non-free image (WP:NFC#UULP). They also proscribe using a photo from a press agency or photo agency ..., unless the photo itself is the subject of sourced commentary in the article (WP:GETTY), which is especially relevant for celebrities.

At the same time, there is a very strong desire by editors to add images to articles, and many editors see it as an "easy way to improve the encyclopedia". This aligns with the idealized progression scheme for each article: According to the guideline for assessing the quality of a Wikipedia article, even "Start-class" articles need to either include an image or have some other very basic feature expected of any article, and "Good articles" are required to have an image (unless it is impossible to obtain one). Consequently, editors almost never agree that no image is better than at least some image, and in biographies, adding the subject's photo as the lead image is particularly seen as a top priority. To this end, contributors will take photographs of notable living subjects themselves, or come up with free images of living subjects in some roundabout way, such as by cropping a freely licensed or public-domain image in which the article subject is not the main subject.

Because of this, we occasionally end up with some peculiar and questionable biographical photos. The phenomenon is inherent to articles about living people, because the perverse incentive discussed in the previous paragraphs attaches to an assumption that a living person could be photographed, but in some aspects it extends to articles about dead people as well. These unusual biographical images may be low in visual quality, taken from afar, a non-facial angle or show their subject in a unique situation ... sometimes a very unique situation.

All of the images included below are either in use or were previously in use on English Wikipedia, generally as lead images. Feel free to add more compelling examples that illustrate the issue discussed in this essay (include only the strongest examples).