Milan's Creatives Speak Out: Duplicate Images Are Eroding Trust in the City's Visual Economy

Duplicate image replacement — the practice of reusing identical or near-identical photographs across unrelated campaigns, publications, and commercial spaces without disclosure — has quietly become one of the more corrosive problems facing Milan's creative sector. The issue surfaced publicly this spring when several independent photographers working in the Isola neighbourhood noticed the same stock image of a woman in a red coat appearing simultaneously on a Porta Nuova mixed-use development brochure, a regional health authority poster near Ospedale Maggiore Policlinico, and an advertising panel on Corso Buenos Aires.

For a city whose fashion and design economy generates tens of billions of euros annually and whose identity is built on the premise of aesthetic authenticity, the complaint is not trivial. The duplication undermines the commercial value of original photography commissions and, more visibly, exposes brands to public ridicule when consumers spot the repetition.

The View From Brera and Beyond

Photographers and art directors affiliated with Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia, the photography institution at Via Meravigli 5, have been circulating a petition since May calling for clearer licensing disclosure requirements on publicly displayed commercial images. The group argues that stock library contracts, which often permit unlimited parallel licensing across unrelated clients, make accidental duplication nearly impossible to prevent without active editorial oversight. Fondazione Forma hosted an informal discussion on the subject in June, drawing participants from across the Navigli creative district and from agencies clustered around Zona Tortona, the post-industrial neighbourhood that anchors Milan's design week calendar every April.

Community members interviewed for this article — none of whom wished to be identified by name given ongoing client relationships — described the problem in practical, financial terms. One graphic designer based near Piazzale Loreto said she had lost a contract renewal after a client discovered that a lifestyle image she had sourced through a licensed stock platform had also appeared in a competitor's catalogue published the same quarter. Another photographer who shoots editorial work for trade publications said agencies routinely request image replacement when duplicates are flagged, but the replacement images are themselves often pulled from the same limited catalogue pools, producing a revolving cycle of near-identical substitutions.

Data, Money, and the Scale of the Problem

The economic stakes are real. Italy's visual communications sector — encompassing advertising photography, editorial licensing, and commercial illustration — was valued at approximately €4.1 billion in 2024 according to figures published by Confindustria Cultura Italia, the national industry federation. Milan accounts for the dominant share of that figure. Licensing disputes and duplication complaints are not systematically tracked by any single body in Lombardy, which means the true frequency of the problem remains anecdotal rather than documented.

What is documented is the growth of AI-assisted image generation as an additional complication. Several designers working for clients preparing brand materials tied to the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, whose opening ceremony is scheduled for February 2026 in the Cortina d'Ampezzo area, said procurement teams had begun demanding AI-generated images partly to avoid duplication risks — only to find that generative models trained on the same datasets produced visually near-identical outputs for different briefs.

The Comune di Milano's cultural communications office has not issued formal guidance on duplicate image disclosure for publicly funded campaigns. Requests for comment submitted to the office this week received an automated acknowledgement but no substantive response by publication time.

For photographers and designers navigating the problem now, practitioners at Fondazione Forma recommend three practical steps: requesting exclusivity windows of at least 90 days in any stock licensing agreement for high-visibility placements; running reverse image searches before final sign-off on any campaign; and drafting explicit duplication-indemnity clauses into client contracts. The third step, several designers noted, is the one clients most frequently resist — which is precisely why, they argue, the practice persists.