Together, we can shift the visual narrative about rural America.

Rural America does not mean white America. The rural economy is not the farm economy. Rural people do not oppose bold solutions to climate change. These communities are driven by a wide range of industries, full of all kinds of diversity, and rich with civic leaders nurturing community-thriving across the country.

But rural imagery doesn't reflect this reality. In a culture where seeing is believing, representation matters.

In 2020, two of the most prominent media outlets — Rolling Stone and the Washington Post — and as recently as May 2023, Vox, used the same stock photo to represent rural progressives: a photo set in a farm field with zero people in it.

Nine in ten rural workers make their living outside of agriculture. A quarter of people living in rural communities are people of color. But in a search of the first 80 public domain photos of “rural leadership,” only four had a person of color in them.

No one knows a rural community better than the people who live there. This project follows the lead of local residents to identify the photos that tell the true story of who they are. By empowering rural people to tell their own stories of claiming power to get things done, we shift the way outsiders think of rural people — and how rural people think of themselves.

Rural communities are as diverse as the people who call them home, which is why this library includes photos from a wide range of communities across the country — capturing images across multiple states to show that:

1. Powerful rural leadership is not rare.
2. Rural leadership is diverse.
3. Rural leadership is getting results.

Every photo in this library is available for free under a Creative Commons license. Journalists, nonprofit organizations, academic institutions, government agencies, policymakers, and content creators are all welcome to download and use these images with attribution.

Through our legislative campaign launched in 2021, we saw that rural policy was stuck in the 1930s. With rural policy entering a new era that recognizes rural diversity, it's time our visuals do, too.

Rural leadership is all around us — let's show it off.

Set your camera's date and time accurately before every shoot. This sounds obvious. It causes more problems than anything else when it's wrong.

Enable GPS on your camera body if your camera supports it. If it doesn't, enable GPS tagging in your editing software and verify it is recording city and state for every frame.

Shoot in RAW. Deliver in full-resolution JPEG or TIFF — no compressed exports, no web-optimized files.

Every file you deliver must contain the following embedded metadata or it will be rejected by our system and returned to you for correction. This is not optional and it is not something the editor can fix on your behalf.

• •Date and time taken — embedded in EXIF. Must reflect the actual moment the shutter fired.
• •City — embedded in IPTC location or GPS metadata. Must be the city where the photo was taken.
• •State — embedded in IPTC location or GPS metadata. Two-letter USPS abbreviation: OH, WA, GA, NC.
• •Description / Caption — embedded in IPTC Description field. A 2–4 sentence description of the photo is required for every image. This becomes the public caption in our library.

When your photo enters our system, it is automatically renamed to this convention:

LastName_FirstName_YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS_City_ST.jpg

Example:

McGarvey_Maddie_20231106_155220_McConnellsville_OH.jpg

This is the filename stored in our library and delivered to anyone who downloads your photo. Your original filename is preserved in our system but is not used publicly.

Every photo showing an identifiable person requires a signed release form before the photo can be published.

Download the Proudly Rural Photo Release Form (PDF)

Naming your release files:Name each signed release to match the photo file it covers. Use the subject's last name, the shoot date, and the location — the same convention as your photo filenames:

SubjectLastName_YYYYMMDD_City_ST.pdf

Example:

Ponchak_20231106_McConnellsville_OH.pdf

If one release covers multiple photos of the same subject, use the date of the shoot. If multiple subjects appear in the same photo, deliver one release per subject using the same naming convention.

Deliver signed release forms alongside your photos in Google Drive — one PDF per subject. Place all releases in a subfolder named Releases inside your delivery folder.

After delivery, your photo subjects will receive a link to privately review their photos. They have 14 days to request removal of any image. Photos are not published until this window has cleared.

For photos with no identifiable people — landscapes, wide shots, objects, or photos taken in public spaces where individuals are not the focus — no release is required. Note this when you deliver by adding NO_RELEASE_NEEDED to the file's IPTC Keywords field.

Deliver your photos to the shared Google Drive folder your editor has shared with you. Organize your delivery in a single folder named:

LastName_FirstName_YYYYMMDD_City_ST

Example:

McGarvey_Maddie_20231106_McConnellsville_OH

Place all photos in this folder. Place all signed release PDFs in a subfolder named Releases. Do not zip the files.

Notify your editor by email when delivery is complete. Do not assume the editor will notice new files in Drive without notification.

All photos in this library are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). Both you and Rural Progress hold rights to the work. Anyone who downloads a photo is required to provide attribution.

Each photo page on ProudlyRural.org includes a citation tool that generates the correct attribution in three formats. Downloaders can copy the citation directly. The formats are:

Web / Creative Commons:

"[Caption]" by [Your Name], [Date]. Rural Progress / Proudly Rural. CC BY 4.0. [URL]

APA:

[Your Name] ([Year]). [Caption] [Photograph]. Rural Progress / Proudly Rural. [URL]

MLA:

[Your Name]. "[Caption]." Proudly Rural, Rural Progress, [Date], [URL]. Accessed [Date].

The citation is generated automatically from your photographer profile and the photo's metadata. If your name is incorrect in our system, contact your editor before your first delivery.

We are continuing to build out Proudly Rural, and we are always interested in hearing from photographers and organizations who want to see their community represented. If you have ideas about communities or stories that should be in this library, get in touch.

Contact your editor at Backroads@RuralProgress.org.