How these pictures were made

Every photograph here was generated. Every photograph on this website was generated rather than taken. There is no office on 61st Street, the workshops and stockrooms are not real places, and the six people on the team page are not photographs of anybody.

There is no handshake anywhere on this site

Search for a management consultancy and you will be shown forty versions of the same four pictures: two people shaking hands, four people pointing at a laptop, a boardroom with a skyline behind it, and a hand writing on a glass wall. They are the visual equivalent of a paragraph about being passionate about partnership, and they say nothing about the business that bought them.

So the question we asked instead was what this trade actually looks at. A management consultancy works in other people's workplaces, so the pictures here are: an empty meeting room with the light coming across the table, a fabrication shop with the shutter half up, a stockroom aisle, a loading bay, a kitchen after service, a brick block in Queens at dusk. Real-looking small businesses, nobody in any of them, and nothing in the frame anybody is trying to sell.

And no whiteboards, no screens and no paper

That one is practical as well as aesthetic. An image generator asked for an office will fill every flat surface with invented writing — a whiteboard covered in words that are not words, a screen showing an interface that does not exist, a report fanned across a table with a wordmark on the cover. It cannot be reliably instructed not to; the only thing that works is composing the object out of the frame.

So there is no whiteboard, no flip chart and no pinboard anywhere on this website. Laptops are closed. There is no screen facing the camera in a single frame. There is not one document, report, invoice or printout: where paper appears it is a blank page or a roll of plain kraft paper, and where a stack of it appears it is photographed edge-on. On a consultancy's website that is a conspicuous absence, and it is a decision rather than an oversight.

Nobody in the pictures is a client

Faces appear in exactly seven images: the six staff portraits and the group photograph. There is no client, no customer and no visitor in any image on this site.

A photorealistic stranger, generated at volume and placed on a page to look like somebody who bought the service, is the closest a website can get to a fabricated testimonial without writing one. This site already refuses those in writing — there is not a single quotation attributed to a person anywhere on it — and a stock-shaped picture of a satisfied client would be the same claim made in a medium nobody reads carefully.

There are also no hands. Partly because hands are the hardest thing in image generation and come back wrong often enough to be a real cost, and partly because the one gesture this trade's photography is made of is two of them shaking.

What that means about the office

There is no office on 61st Street. There is no meeting room with a long oak table in it, the workshop and the stockroom are not places, and the six people on the team page are not photographs of anybody. This is a demonstration site for a firm that does not exist, and every page says so at the bottom.

This is a demonstration website. This is a demonstration website. Woodside Management Partners is not a real firm, no enquiry sent from this site reaches anybody, and the telephone number is a placeholder. It was built to show what a small professional firm gets for a fixed price.

There are no certificates on this website. There are no certificates, designations, memberships or awards anywhere on this website. Management consulting is not a licensed profession, so any letters after a name here would either be invented or decorative. What each person has actually done is on the team page instead.