These figures exist in a vacuum, as on the blank page of fiction, without context in which they make sense. Thus, as art makes the world smaller, it deepens the chasms between people. When viewed from afar, people seem to conform to stereotype. Homosexuals love Barbra Streisand movies. Frat boys are born with unremoveable backwards baseball caps on their heads.
Artists maintain basilisk stares.
Hispanic immigrants have no desire to learn English. Cops wear bad suits. Gordon Parks has a knack for zeroing in on visually exploitable characteristics, for finding the most intense means to gratify our expectations. An edgy and exciting photograph, its police detectives seem to be right out of a TV show about police detectives. Their work setting is depressing, because that's where bad guys live.